Social media gives you direct connection to and from existing customers, prospects, and brand agents about anything and everything, from products to challenges, all at once. However, with all the fuss and work needed for brand engagement, how do you strengthen these relationships?
Here are the 10 best practices for brand engagement in social media:
1. Follow and Engage With Followers
If have a strong following of thousands or millions of social media fans and supporters but following only hundreds of them, it tells your followers you have no interest in community feedback. Follow your followers and engage in discussions with them. It will help boost overall following and build good relationships within your social media community.
In addition, a number of followers will thank you for following back. It will open the chance to talk to them and learn more from their needs and demands.
2. Avoid Oversharing
Even though it is critical for you to interact continually, remain in the loop, and keep social relationships, frequent posting of status updates or tweets will turn off and push you away from your audience and followers. Give more emphasis to share only valuable items relevant to your community and reflect the image of the brand. Come up with a calendar on the ideal time and date to share content.
3. Be Social in Social Media
It gives the impression on what already is clear for most people, yet lots of brands that use social media do not really develop social skills to interact with followers. You have to engage with the customers, influencers, and all the people who want to reach out to your brand. However, avoid the spammers and trolls.
Social media is about building relationships in a community. Open your mind and step out of the box you are in. Not all of your connections have to be on the same wavelength. Derive motivation from a diverse group of followers.
Never overlook social media tools for engagement and monitoring. These platforms will help look for mentions of your brand across social communities, and connect with people who have an interest in your product, service, or industry.
Social networking. (Flickr / Chris Potter)
4. Control the Impulse
You do not need to make a fuss of each conversation that mentions your brand. Every so often it is better for other people, such as influencers and other members of the community, to butt in rather than you. Find out the types of posts you have to answer back and leave the others.
5. Be Careful With Your Tone and Voice
When your tone and voice are uninteresting to prospects and customers, change it. Even though it is imperative that social media engagement has to be as distinctive as your brand image, it is also significant not to digress from it.
6. Uphold Transparency
Honesty and transparency will go a long way and reap rewards in social media. It is a key component to build trust within your community. Provide background access to customers of your business through videos, live streaming, and internal events of the company. Use employee profiles with links and Google Hangouts to connect with customers.
One by one, prospects will trust and have more interest in your brand, and keep in touch for updates.
7. Keep it Short
Even though Twitter restricts messages up to 140 characters, other social media platforms, such as Facebook and Google+, have no character limits. However, Twitter also has a knack to make shorter status updates the better option.
8. Take the Initiative, be Preemptive
Observe and monitor the main feeds and news in your industry, such as social media marketing. It helps gather a number of posts without mentions of your brand but is relevant. It shows new discussions and exchanges you may want to participate and allows you to form relationships. It keeps you up to date with issues that may lead to a crisis.
9. Generate Brand Awareness
Social media platforms provide the opportunity to boost and reinforce your profile to the public. You may start campaigns in the grassroots level, interact with influencers across different industries, share their content, and remain proactive in discussions. If you generate and share useful content, you will be prepared if influencers will send you a deluge of new followers.
10. Negative or Positive, Still Its Valuable Feedback
Even though you will have the urge to answer back on positive feedback and erase the negative, do not do that. As an alternative, reply to positive feedback, send your appreciation to the community for product recommendations, sharing your content, and ask members or followers to share stories as guest bloggers or through an interview.
If you get negative feedback, think of it as useful reproach and a chance to improve your product or service. When somebody companies, no matter how many they are, it is likely they want you to listen and solve real problems related to your product or service.