While your customers may assume that virtually everybody is using social media these days it’s far from the truth. People use social media but businesses don’t.
And it’s all free. It doesn’t cost anything to setup a Facebook or Twitter page.
Social media is about relationships as much as tactics and techniques. A strong human element to your brand will help customers trust your credibility and perspective.
Most companies believe they’d be better at social media conversations with customers if they had more people or time to work on it. While this is probably true, the misstep in this situation is neglecting to realize that effective social media engagement doesn’t have to take a lot of time to be effective. In most cases, those managing social channels just need a bit of direction and focus. Often, just getting together with the marketing, product development or customer service departments can help you set a course that’s both manageable and worth the time and effort.
To fully take advantage of social media as a tool for progress, a system needs to be put in place to make sure the ideas coming from customers over Facebook and Twitter are passed along to the appropriate decision-makers. Communication is essential in order that feedback can actually cause change. Also, once customers realize their ideas are being turned into reality, they’ll be more likely to contribute new ideas again.
So where do you begin?
If you a smaller company without a marketing department, you can always do this yourself. It doesn’t cost anything but time.
- Get feedback: There is even software for that like Uservoice, GetSatisfaction or OpenMind. Or simply listen to what people say on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and forums. There are also tools for that.
- Create demand: Better than simply reacting is proactively informing about upcoming products, features or services. This way the demand is there before the actual product arrives. Apple is doing it all the time.
- Offer and discounts: Once you have an account on Facebook or Twitter or even before you gain a significant following the best thing you can do is offering discounts. People will follow you then and they also will buy.
- Get attention: Sounds simple doesn’t it? Say something of importance and then you get attention.
- Spread the word: Tell the people about you and your business once you have established a connection with your following by getting attention over and over again and again. Announce changes on your blog, promote your next appearance at a conference or like mentioned above present your new product.
- Build brand loyalty: Brand loyalty is self-explanatory isn’t it? People like your brand and then buy from it in the future again. How do you make them loyal customers? Either by providing formidable goods and services or you provide something for free, be it information or community.
- Establish a community: The Web is a great place for creating communities. People from all over the world who are obsessed about the same weird hobby can virtually meet with other like-minded individuals. You can establish a community of fans of your brand right there on your blog, feedback site or Facebook group.
- Answer questions: People as questions all the time on the Web. Answer questions, be helpful, whether you are dealing with your own products and services or the niche by and large. Do not ignore your current or potential customers.
- Provide support: sometimes people have more than questions. They are annoyed, angry or even desperate. Your product or service may have caused that suffering. A simple tweet can help. Show your sympathy, offer a service and be polite!
- Get clients: Of course you get clients or customers this way as well.
- Monitor trends: You can find out more on social media than just who is talking or complaining about you. Many tools allow to watch trends unfold. You determine what’s cool and where the demand is almost instantly by scanning Facebook and Twitter with simple tools like Topsy.
- Identify influencers: Topsy also allows you to find out who actually tweets about your business. You can check how many clicks these people brought to your site via bit.ly or Twitter’s own stats. Indeed Topsy even marks important users “influential” or “highly influential” based on their activity.
- Reach out: Once you know who likes you, you can reach out to these people. blogger outreach is even an established industry term by now. Contact them, simply express your gratitude, invite them to your next product presentation or send them your products for testing purposes.
- Discuss features: Feedback is great but as long as it’s a monologue by disgruntled users complaining about you it isn’t very helpful. Often users can already suggest solutions. O you can try to explain how you’d like to change your product or service. A discussion will often yield far better results than just simple feedback.
- Debunk myths: People are often complaining about you in public on social media in an exaggerated way. They may misunderstand your product or go way over board out of anger. These people will make look like the worst hotel in history or the most expensive restaurant in the country. Just counter these allegations with numbers, customer feedback etc. Often people complain about your brand even without trying it just because someone else said “it horrible”.
- Market offerings: Yes, indeed, you can market your offerings as well. It’s not like marketing elsewhere though. You don’t appear on the social media scene and start shouting about you and your offers. All the actions mentioned above and below are part of the marketing. People like you when you do all of or at least part of it right and then nobody will mad at you for just mentioning your offer even without it being new or a bargain.
- Build links: You can get links on social media and even likes and tweets counts as votes on search engines these days. So building links on social media is a wonderful side effect.
- Get publicity: Social media is used not only by bloggers but also by old school journalists. Social media press releases and giving away the news to bloggers can result in publicity beyond the social .
- Watch the competition: In case you are not on social media your competition probably already is. You can watch their steps and try to learn or mimic them. As long as they excel on social media you have to do that. Than you can just watch them like you watch your overall industry and mentions of your brand.