With over 2.07 billion active accounts of social media users as of date, social media proves to be more powerful than ever.
As more and more people engage online, businesses have both the opportunity and challenge to penetrate this platform and use the market to its advantage by providing engaging and informative content to its targeted audience.
Image Credit: Creative Commons, Flickr: Jason A. Howie
With the arena starting to become a lot more competitive as time goes by, how can retail businesses catch up and be at par with the trend? Let's explore some ways to help you to navigate your way around social media:
1. Evaluate your goals and tie it back to other efforts
It's not enough to have a social media account and have random posts lined up for the whole week. Evaluate what you want to achieve and make sure it ties back to your other initiatives. It's easier to set up the steps once you've figured out the kind of outcome that you are expecting - is it to raise more awareness about a new product? Or is it to increase more traffic to your online store? By identifying your priorities, it will be easier for you to pick the best strategies that will lead you to achieving your set goals.
2. Listen to your consumers
Most retailers use social media to listen to their customers and track their insights. Based on those insights, companies are able to make new product decisions and figure out ways to best engage with their consumers. For an instance, retail giant Walmart which has garnered more than 32 million likes on their Facebook page strategically plan out their content calendar to showcase their latest products and listen to customer feedback through the platform.
3. Build a community
In order to create brand loyalty, it is important to start developing your brand's community online. One of the most effective ways to keep them coming back is by engaging with them and providing immediate response with their queries and concerns.
4. Set your tone
By establishing your brand voice before you engage with your audience will help maintain the quality of the conversation and communications. Do you want to tickle their fancy? Do you want to attract clients who are on the higher spectrum of the market? Setting the tone and knowing how to deliver your message would greatly help on targeting and letting your message come across the right people.
5. Measure your effectiveness
Don't let your efforts put to waste. Set quantifiable goals to check the ROI for every campaign. Setting your own benchmarks would help on strengthening and strategizing your campaign, while monitoring your conversations with your audience would help on knowing if your game plan is really that effective.
6. Get to know your platform
While it's nice to have your brand almost everywhere online, having scattered efforts will be useless unless they're all helping achieve a central goal. One of the most important things that retailers need to keep in mind when trying to keep up with omni-channel users is to focus on platforms and channels that will drive the most return of investment and not just be everywhere for the sake of being there.
However, do not let these stop you from exploring other media like Instagram, Youtube, or LinkedIn. The key to finding which platform should you thrive is knowing the users of your chosen social media website, and knowing who you want to reach. Being able to familiarize yourself with these elements would ultimately make it easier for you to relay your message to the right people.
With the vast opportunities for retailers to engage with their target market online, it's important to stay focus on initiatives that will not only help increase the engagement with the brand but also help build the community where consumers could be heard and connect with people of similar interests and provide a cohesive experience whether they're in-store, on your ecommerce site, on mobile or on your social channels.