Increase your presence on the social media websites (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google +, Tumblr) by building outstanding content, quality customer service and attention seizing visuals. Once you build highly efficient social channels, you are inviting success home. Start capturing leads and witnessing an increased number of visitors signing up as valuable customers through the process of gaining loyal brand promoters.
Dust your social channels using some of the strategies that we will discuss and make the social networking websites a certain platform that will impact your business’s growth hugely.
1. Thinking and execution of a fixed Game-Plan
Having a well-thought game – a plan is a necessity, or else your content goes down the drain. How frequently do you post, tweet or share your content and what your content says every time you post, are huge determinants of how your potential customer reacts?
Too many times, and probably you are marked as spam, a follower stops following you and blocks you. Too few, and people fail to acknowledge your presence. Also, the content should be visually appealing, useful and actionable and emotionally compelling. Therefore, keep a check on how frequent and how appealing are the posts of your competitors and plan accordingly.
Plan and create an editorial calendar that is easy to understand and implement. Plan ahead and keep updating your plans according to the need of the hour. In addition to this, the inputs and opinions of all your members of your content management team and valuable customers should be kept in mind.
For starters, Google Excel Docs are a great help and you can use social media management platforms like Hootsuite and Buffer to help schedule and manage social feeds.
2. Treat each social media marketing platform with a different approach
Each social channel is a separate entity that focuses on content differing from one another. Thus, the approach about publishing the very same content on different channels should vary.
If you launched an updated version of an existing product and claimed critical appreciation for it, it certainly is news that has to be posted on every channel. Only that, you cannot post the same content on all the channels, YouTube and Instagram followers will appreciate a fantastic visual highlighting the new features whereas LinkedIn will look forward to educational content.
3. Customer service is the most important: respond and interact
A customer’s feedback: tweets, comments on a post or a mail, are the best ways to understand what your customer thinks of your product. You can display an Instagram Wall on digital screens at your store or website and showcase a feed of well-curated customer-generated content such as photos, videos, or reviews to attract more customers and spread positive word of mouth. Whether negative or positive, an immediate reply from the customer is a must. A well written courteous reply, flatters the customer, whereas an untimely response or no response at all, will lead to the loss of trust in your company and the customers will proceed to look for their answers to your competitors. Also, a negative response should not be deleted, rather embraced and replied to in an equally courteous and helpful response. Thanking them for pointing out the bug and finding a timely solution to the customer’s complaint is the way to deal with it. Keep checks on the online feedback that the other companies receive and offer help and responses to the unanswered queries. This way, you are creating a new lead that would appreciate your customer service and recommend your brand to his friends. Finally, be yourself and be true to your brand voice when creating a reply, maintaining the integrity of your brand.
4. Advertise better
Social networks are also about advertising and getting leads. If your product targets a certain moiety of people (based on job titles, age, gender, location), then your ads should target only that section of the people. Dave Kerpen, founder, and CEO of Likeable Media said, “What’s cooler than reaching a billion people on Facebook? Reaching the right 1,000, the right 100, the right 10, or the right one”.
Send out your advertisement to a limited number of people, using each and every strand of information available on the site, from whom a response is highly expected.
Word-of-mouth advertising is another perk of advertising on a social media website. Anyone, who likes or comments on your post, automatically spreads the word about your company, because the like or comment and hence, the post, can be seen by all his other friends.
Also, giving away free useful content and services to people ensures that your company scores loyal customers for life.
5. Embrace Mishaps
Re-posting every now and then, the same blogs and posts are likely to catch the eye of a customer. Embracing and apologizing for prominent mistakes is the appropriate response. Proactively, send out content from your social accounts apologizing and informing people about the ways in which the error is being handled so that the customers are aware. It shows the human element and the vulnerable side of a company, which appeals to the customers.
Big blunders can be handled in an altogether different manner. Let’s look at an example. Pamea, a Hubspot employ, posted a picture of her baby bump on the company’s Twitter account. Instead, of crying about in embarrassment, she created an awesome blog post. “littlebabylumb.com/baby-blog”, which received tons of love and appreciation.