Social Media channels, with its 4.2 billion social media users, enables you to connect with people worldwide and offers you an opportunity to make a living. That’s right; money is where the people are, and if you know your ideal audience and their interests, you’re a step away from being able to use these channels to make an income.
When we talk about social media, entertainment and social connections is the first thing to come to mind – because that’s precisely what it was all about back in the day.
However, with over 97% of Fortune 500 companies on social media, it’s obvious that the focus has shifted beyond mere amusement. So, how to get paid on social media?
Fortunately, earning an income off the platforms isn’t rocket science. But it does require strategic planning to stand out among the competitors and entice your audience so you get paid.
How to Get Paid On Social Media? 12 Killer Strategies
You do not necessarily need to have a business to generate income from social media. The platforms offer countless ways to make money so long as you are passionate about fulfilling your financial goals.
Forbes, for instance, reported that over 50 million content creators exist on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. Among them, over 2 million people make six figures by creating content regularly or weekly.
You can also boost your earnings by implementing a few actionable tips. Here’s how to get paid from social media, whether you’re a business owner or not.
- Sell Your Products and Services
Selling your products and services is a typical way to generate income from social media channels. Data shows that 92.1% of US marketers at companies with more than 100 employees were predicted to use social media for marketing.
Another stat reveals that many social media users join different platforms in order to follow their favorite brands. This means that businesses and customers alike understand the importance of social media.
Because businesses are where the customer is, brands tend to make social media accounts to target their ideal customers. In fact, many social media channels, including Facebook and Instagram, enable brands to create business accounts to dedicate their pages to business making it easier for you to sell your products or services.
- Become a Social Media Manager
Don’t have your own business? No problem! You can help a brand scale its business by managing their social media accounts. Social media managers plan, develop, and implement strategies for the social media accounts of a company.
For instance, you might be responsible for creating compelling content regularly. This could involve sharing attention-grabbing tweets, posting informational infographics, and sharing business-related content on social media.
While this may sound easy, social media management can be tough as there’s a lot of competition out there. You must have excellent communication, organizational, management, and creative skills to nail each post and respond to customers.
Plus, familiarization with social media tools is essential to schedule posts and avoid miscalculations. However, if you enjoy being on social media and love being creative, this type of role might be perfect for you.
- Create Content On TikTok
Although it only launched in 2016, TikTok has become the king of all social media channels. TikTok even overtook YouTube for the average watch time in the US and UK. What’s the reason behind the booming growth?
The short-form videos seem to be what the modern person wants as this has kept TikTok’s users hooked for long hours. The platform ensures to give the content people want to see and IG and Youtube has since began trying to push this type of short-form video content out as well. As a result, TikTok’s popularity is skyrocketing with each passing day.
But how do you make money off social media using TikTok? By creating inspiring, entertaining, and meaningful content. The platform rewards and supports content creators for their effort.
However, you must post videos that align with TikTok’s Community Guidelines. Additionally, you must have at least 10,000 followers and 100,000 video views in the past 30 days to earn money from their creator fund as this is what will make you eligible to earn an income directly from TikTok.
- Become an Influencer On Instagram
Think about your interests. Do you like to talk about mental health, physical fitness, beauty, or sports? You can pick your favorite niche and become a social media influencer. While the role isn’t limited to Instagram, we suggest it because it remains the most popular platform for influencers.
Instagram offers several features to drive more engagement and make your words valuable. For instance, you can post stories, go live, and share captivating images to inspire your audience.
For instance, if you’re into fitness, you can go live and talk about your fitness routine. This may include you exercising in the gym. When the audience sees what happens behind the curtain, they’re intrigued to follow their favorite influencers.
Someone into beauty can share a make-up or nighttime skincare routine tutorial to grab their audience’s attention. You can check Instagram Payouts to learn about the paying strategies of the platform.
- Share Your Knowledge
Everybody loves to talk about their interests. So, what are you interested in and are there a lot of other people that can benefit from the knowledge you’ve acquired?
You can use this knowledge to make money. But how to get paid from social media by sharing your knowledge? You can join YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and even Twitter to spread your top tips and do’s and don’ts on these platforms.
However, the key is to keep your content niche specific as opposed to talking about everything and anything that you’re interested in. For people to associate your name with a particular area of expertise,, you must only talk about that one area and things that revolve around that area of expertise.
For instance, if you started creating content about becoming a skilled writer on YouTube, post similar content on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. This will boost the chance of your success.
The more people associate you with being the go-to person when it comes to how to become a skilled writer, the more people will follow you for this info on that and the more engagement you’ll create – a win-win for you.
- Review Affiliate Products
Another way to generate income through social media is by reviewing affiliate products. The formula behind this money-making strategy is pretty simple. Brands connect with other brands or influencers for reviews when they have a similar audience to the brand’s customer base.
For instance, say you run a fitness store. A brand that recently launched yoga mats might ask you to review their latest product on your blog or on your social media page. This allows them to get their product to the forefront of their target audience through you, and you get paid as a result of sharing their product on your page.
However, the law requires you to disclose the affiliate relationships to make clear that you are getting paid for this type of advertisement. Ensure you skim through the FTC regulations to ensure compliance.
- Make Money through Sponsored Posts
You can also earn money by promoting products and services of other brands. Also called sponsored posting, it involves you sharing content and posting ads for another brand. You get the cash when a user clicks on the ad and buys a product.
Not only does sponsor posting allow you to make money, but it also offers a way to leverage your social media followers.
Fortunately, most social media channels feature sponsored post setups. Twitter, for instance, has a direct link to sign up for sponsored posts.
You can visit the official SponsoredTweets page, match your brand with relevant topics and start generating an income off relevant Tweets.
- Join YouTube
With 2.89 billion monthly active users, YouTube ranks as the second most popular social network. Our brain processes visual content 60,000 times quicker than text. As such, everybody loves watching helpful, inspiring, and entertaining YouTube videos.
You can create your YouTube channel and share helpful content to gain followers and make money. YouTube has recently started to put more emphasis on Youtube Shorts which offers another enticing way to capture the audience’s attention.
The platform is now paying content creators for short-form video too and highlights that the short-form video funds are worth $100 million in 2021 and 2022. The eligibility is open to everyone. However, you must create unique content that people love in order to successfully earn through these funds.
- Sell Your Art
Are you into art and design? If yes, social media can be a means to show off your talents to people worldwide and you can sell your unique pieces in a much easier way than ever before.
Whether it’s paintings, photography, or even social media design templates, you can post your original artwork on Instagram and Tumblr to reach a wider audience and start attracting attention to your talents. The moment your art starts getting in front of the right people that are looking to buy, just like that, you now have a new stream of revenue.
Once you start building your popularity as an artist or someone who makes quality design templates, you can shift toward ecommerce giants like Etsy or Amazon to start scaling so you can sell even more pieces of your art.
- Use Social Media Advertising
Do you enjoy helping people scale their business and make more money? Social media advertising is the way to go! It enables you to hyper-target your ideal customers and build an audience database to monitor your return on investment.
But how to get paid to advertise on social media? You can either use social media advertising to directly grow your personal business or you can become a PPC specialist and help other companies run ads on social media so that you help them grow their business.
- Creative Writing
Social media can be your income source if you have a massive following and an interest in writing. Not only can you sell your services through social media, but you can also use it to generate writing ideas.
For example, Neil Gaiman, a fantasy author, used fan-submitted story ideas in his work A Calendar of Tales.
The author asked his followers to answer questions like, “Tell me something you lost in September,” and “What’s your happiest memory of XYZ month.” The writer then turned the answers into short stories that he knew his audience would love since the ideas came from them.
- Earn through Snapchat
Did you know Snapchat pays up to $1 million to content creators daily? You can get lucky by submitting your best snaps and being in the Spotlight. However, your content is moderated and only shared if it meets the platform’s requirements and if other people love what you’re posting.
If your Snap goes viral, the social media platform will notify you of your eligibility to receive a Spotlight Payout. Monitor the trends on this platform to see what is performing well and start creating content regularly as this is what it takes to have a chance for your videos to go viral.
Closing Notes
There’s no simple answer to the question, “How to get paid on social media?” Social channels offer numerous ways to interact, communicate, share, and engage with the audience to get paid.
You can become a content creator, a blogger, a social media manager, a TikToker, or join an affiliate program to help you start earning income across these social media channels. But, you must understand at its core how digital marketing works in order to really take advantage of all the different ways people are monetizing social media.
If you want to learn how to succeed in Digital Marketing so you can start earning money on Social Media, JobPrepped’s Digital Marketing Training will train you in everything you need to know so that you can start earning an income as fast as possible in the booming field of Digital Marketing.
JobPrepped has helped 3,000+ people launch their Digital Marketing careers both in terms of landing freelance clients and job offers and would can help you too.
If you’re looking to start earning money on Social Media, there’s no time like the present as the Digital Marketing industry is booming as more and more people are spending more and more time online and making their purchasing decisions there as well.