Ten Top Tips to get more out of your Social Media Efforts
Check out this Blog Post from www.10thstep.com– Ten Top Tips on engaging your customer with your business and geting more out of your social media efforts.
The social media bandwagon is truly in full swing with a large percentage of small businesses seeing social media as a low cost way to create awareness of their business, products or services.
However a key drawback for many businesses using these platforms is they just don’t understand them.
Social media marketing can be a very useful tool for your business, if used to compliment your overall marketing strategy and used in tandem with other mediums. It’s not all about having thousands of likes or indeed having just as many followers as this does not really mean a lot. Your core focus, as a small business should be to create engaging content which your target audience will actually find interesting.
From there they may wish to find out more; your overall goal here is to build the relationship with your customer.
Poor content and messages will ultimately drive customers away from being social with your brand or business so it’s very important to get just the right mix when using social media for marketing purposes.
Here are 10th Steps’ Top 10 Tips on engaging your customer with your business and getting more out of your social media efforts.
1. Encourage your customers to join your conversations & share their experiences with your business, products or services.
2. ‘Connect’ with customers or people who want to connect with your business.
3. Don’t get wrapped up with constantly trying to add or get people to like your page. Many small businesses spend way too much time adding people who have really no interest in their business or brand. Our view on this is if you have good engaging content this process will naturally happen.
4. Be local. Be sure to work at connecting with people in your local business geographical area.
5. The saying “Build it and they will come” is not always the case when it comes to social media. Many small businesses simply think that just by setting up a page on Facebook or Twitter and leaving it to its own devices is enough. Sending message after message to users asking them to like your page will also alienate your potential customers and will not convert into potential sales. It’s all about being proactive and interacting with your customers.
6. Stand out in the Crowd – Have something different when people land on your page or profile. For example, creating a landing page using the Facebook Static FBML app and creating a special offer which will capture attention and engage your customer gives something to them and keeps them interested.
7. Avoid the direct sales approach by trying to sell, sell, and sell all the time as the only result this will have is to turn people off your page.
8. Listen. This is very important in social media. Too many businesses are not actually listening to what their customers say. This is invaluable market research!. Use your social media efforts to improve your customer service and overall customer experience on how they interact with your products or services.
9. Engage, engage, engage. Find new and innovate ways to interact with your customers.
10. Monitor activity – Use tools to monitor your marketing efforts. There is little to no point investing time and effort using social media for marketing purposes if you don’t monitor its progress. Let’s face it, social media is not really free, as the small business owner it will cost you time and effort. Using Facebook insights for example will give you access to a lot of great basis data on just how your page is performing, it will show you relevant information on what your total fan base is, top fans, or how effective your ad campaigns are.
Source: www.10thstep.com
