Social media is the next big thing which lets you engage, interact and connect with your customers. There are millions of active customer interactions taking place on different social media sites. It has become the marketplace for businesses to target their potential customers directly. Nearly one-third of the total population is engaged on social media.
As per January 2017, the total number of active users on various social media sites are as follows:
Facebook – 1871 Million
Whatsapp – 1000 Million
Instagram – 600 Million
Tumblr – 550 Million
Twitter – 317 Million
Snapchat – 300 Million
Pinterest – 150 Million
Unbelievable right? With these many potential customers right there in front of you, without investing much money you can have an exceptional market to do business with. Now you need to understand that not all social media platforms are ideal for all kinds of businesses. You have to do a research and find out which medium to socialize works best for you. Youtube is a video sharing platform whereas Instagram & Pinterest is an image sharing platform. Facebook nowadays has emerged as a platform with the highest level of engagement where you can share all sorts of videos, images or blog. To make social media work for you, you need to find out which platform contains users that fall into your demographic profile.
Let’s understand what social media engagement is. Social media engagement is all about engaging with your customers by creating conversations, getting feedbacks and encouraging to communicate more & more in order to gain their trust, build a reputation and relationship. Following are few tips through which you can engage with your customers.
- Manage your online reputation: The best way to keep your customers engaged is first of all by maintaining your reputation online.
- Create engaging and quality contents: The main key to get more and more engagement on social media is by creating quality content related to your niche. A good content sometimes is enough to drive audience and get engagement.
- Ask for feedback and reviews: Your job should not end once you have successfully converted an audience into a customer. Ask their feedback on the service and ask them to leave a review on social media to build a trust among your current and potential customers.
- Give them an option to connect with you directly: Customers should be provided with an opportunity on social media where they can share anything be it issues or their customer care experience with you directly so that they feel more connected to you at any point of time.
- Run contests: This is the best way to get an engagement from even not so active customers on social media. Make sure that this is just not clickbait but a genuine contest so that they actively participate even in future.
- Branding: Create your branded hashtags and ask your customer to tag them in their posts which helps in promoting your brand. Get top influencers to engage with your brand.
- Create posts on trending topics: When you post about trending and viral topics then it brings new traffic to your social network.
- Respond back: Make sure each customer’s query or issues are attended and responded back in minimum time because you don’t want to make them feel taken for granted. Do you?
- Don’t spam: Make sure that your customer doesn’t feel flooded and spammed with your posts otherwise you are going to lose your fan following rather than building one.
- Social Sharing Buttons: Provide your audience with easy social sharing buttons so that they can share your content which ultimately will drive more traffic to your social media.
- Be consistent: Being consistent is also one of the key factors to getting continuous engagement from your audience. Use platforms like Hootsuite to schedule your posts in advance.
- Mailing List: Create a mailing list and keep your customers updated with all new news and information.
Lastly don’t forget to check & audit the stats on different social media platform to know about your reach, impressions, and engagement. This will allow you to know what kind of content is getting more views and response so you can create more engaging content for your business.
