How to Use Social Payment to Improve Your Digital Marketing Results

Social payment consists of requiring a publication on social networks so that a user has access to a certain offer, such as an eBook, webinar or consultancy

Have you ever heard of social payment?

Despite what the name suggests, this strategy has nothing to do with financial reward for the purchase of a product or service. In fact, these are posts made on social networks by users in exchange for an offer. And the technique can help boost your Digital Marketing results.

Want to know what social payment is and how to use the tactic in your social media campaigns? Read this article by SkyMarketing .

What is social payment?

Social payout is a technique used to ensure that a company’s offering has a much wider reach via social media.

In this context, an offer is understood to be something free (financially), but that has good value for the public. The most common format of offers in these cases are eBooks or educational webinars, but they can also be free assessments or consultancy offers, a raffle, among others.

So, to download the material, receive the evaluation or participate in the draw, the user needs to “pay” with a tweet or a post on Facebook.

Why use social payment?

When the first cases of social payment emerged, many social media “gurus” condemned the practice. The main argument was that it wasn’t “right” to force people to share on their networks, and that if the materials were really good, people would nominate them naturally.

Without getting into philosophical discussions, the fact is that social pay works. Following our examples and several clients, we see that rich content offered in exchange for a tweet or post on Facebook has an average of more than 10 times the number of shares than open content.

The important thing is that it is a fair exchange. People are willing to pay with a share on social media if the content is deep and of great quality.

When to use and when not to use social payment?

We have always been big proponents of Lead Generation, and the most efficient way to do this is to ask the user (potential customer) to fill out a form with their information in exchange for educational material.

However, we understand that it would be too much to ask the user to fill out a form and make a social payment at the same time. That’s why we recommend choosing one or the other option for each moment.

The ideal is, for each material, always create two Landing Pages: one in the normal format with a form, and the other in the “social payment” format. Then, in each channel, you must choose which page is the best to be promoted.

As a rule of thumb, it’s best to promote the social payment page to channels where you already have contact information for Leads (such as the email base), and where people already know and trust the company, so don’t be afraid to pay with a share even without seeing the material first.

For channels where most visitors will be in contact with the company for the first time, it is better to ask for a form to be filled out. Thus, the barrier for downloading is much lower and, mainly, you can collect contact information and generate business opportunities for the company.

How does mechanics work?

There are some systems that make it possible to implement the technical part of this mechanic, but generally the way for the user works like this:

  1. The user sees the Landing Page with the description of the material and clicks the button to pay with a tweet or post on Facebook.
  2. The user goes to a second screen where the message and link that will be posted on the social network is shown. In some tools it is possible to edit the text.
  3. The system asks the user to authenticate the app with their Twitter or Facebook account.
  4. The system publishes the post on behalf of the user, which is sent to the page with the offered content.

Where to point this link?

One detail that seems silly but makes a lot of difference is which Landing Page the link mentioned above points to.

If configured for Landing Page with social pay, new users will also see the Landing Page with social pay. In this case, the viral loop is bigger, but new users don’t become Leads when downloading the material.

If the link is pointed to the Landing Page with the form, new users become Leads when downloading the material. The viral loop shrinks in size, but it’s still big.

Therefore, we recommend the first case only when the objective is to maximize the reach of a material, even at the expense of losing the opportunity to generate (many) Leads.

Technical details to be considered

As I mentioned above, there are some tools and even “home-made” ways to implement social payment. To choose one of them, it is important to pay attention to some technical details that greatly affect the results.

Charge the tweet in fact

In the hall of homemade solutions above or even some WordPress plugins that propose this, there is an implementation of “pay with tweet” that is simple, but not very efficient.

With it, when clicking the button, the user only sees a pop-up with a Twitter window already filled with the message and the link. As the user is not required to tweet (and also has complete freedom to edit the message and the link itself), in practice many of them end up not tweeting to get the content, that is, the number of shares drops a lot.

Do not take the user to an unknown place

Other tools have a slightly different problem. By clicking on the button, the user is sent to a completely different environment from the site he was on, both to edit the message and to authenticate. Many times there is still the aggravating factor that this part is in another language.

This often brings a feeling of distrust that inhibits conversion and diminishes the effectiveness of the campaign.

Mark Lead Conversion

As these systems are usually isolated from the CRM or Marketing Automation tool that the company already uses, the new conversions that a (known) Lead performs end up not being computed and entered in its history.

These conversions with social payment are also important information for the commercial area to have available before approaching a potential customer.


When creating two versions of the Landing Page, as mentioned above, it’s important to tell Google that only one of them should “fight” for a position in the search results.

Therefore, the rel=canonical HMTL tag must be used in the other Landing Page accordingly.

Did you like these tips on how to use social payment? Have you tested this tactic in your company?

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