Social media marketing success is based almost entirely on how well you engage with your customers. Okay, so what does engagement mean in this new world of social media?
Simply put, our traditional definitions of engaging with customers no longer apply. Customer relationships must be earned. Social media provides an opportunity to do something more meaningful than just old-school marketing.
As a company, you need to abandon the old-school marketing notions of one-to-many, fire-and-forget brand building or product offering exercises. Your customers don’t want to hear from you, they want to engage with you – creating a sense of shared values.
Christine Dugas, in her USA Today article titled “Nurturing clients with social media can pay off”, said social media and the Internet have leveled the playing field for companies, helping them foster closer relationships with customers and identifying potential new customers. With that said, companies need to spend the same amount of time in nurturing and retaining current customers and social media can help manage these relationships too.
The USA Today article mentioned that most companies are aware of social media and high-tech tools, but are often slow to jump into using them. Many of those companies are not willing to move ahead with social media until they see how it works out for someone else in their industry.
So, what are some of the essential steps companies should take when creating and managing their social media engagement efforts? Here are my recommendations:
- Planning: Why am I engaging in this conversation and what do I hope to get out of it? Good question. Planning is the starting point for any customer engagement effort regardless of the audience or intent. You need to plan your social media on where, when, how, and with what kind of content (and at what frequency) to create in reaching out to your audiences. By creating a plan, your company is able to measure results and determine the effectiveness of each campaign.
- Listening: What have my targeted audiences been saying about me? The cornerstone of any relationship is listening, and social media makes this exercise particularly easy courtesy of the digital footprints created by all those online conversations. Trackur or Netvibes create listening stations that enable businesses to track and respond to brand mentions across the social media sphere. By listening, you can learn what customers and the larger world think about you and your products, and allows you to respond creatively to acquire or retain a customer.
- Communicating: What am I going to say that will generate my desired outcome? Work with me, don’t sell to me says the customer. Content marketing is king and social media makes your company a publisher. Today, companies are being forced to let go of stale one-way business collateral and engage with customers in a form and format of their choosing. Which means your company must create value-added content that is engaging (i.e., educational, humorous, compelling, evocative, or otherwise worth the time to read or share). The key drivers of engagement are going to be things like what, when, and how much you post – content that should be defined in your content calendar.
- Measuring & Responding: What was my targeted audiences’ response to my communications and did it net me the desired results? You have created and executed against a social media engagement plan, you did your due diligence to determine what was being said about your company and products, and you have published content across your social media network in a coordinated, targeted fashion. Did you get the desired results? If not, you have the ability to get immediate feedback allowing you to refine your tactics to improve your results. Remember, you just don’t want to know that people have mentioned your brand, you want to know why they mentioned and you want to respond in some capacity.
- Testing & Improvement: Knowing what you know now, what can you do to improve your results with the next conversation? By digging deep into the behavioral habits and response rates of your targeted audiences, you will understand the content that best resonates with each audience, the ideal time to publish your content, who is most likely to respond and when and in what form they want their information – and much, much more.
We live in a relationship economy which means it’s important for companies to smartly use social media to personalize the business and build trust. While social media is about learning, listening, and building your marketing strategy in real time, you can’t ignore the analytics – measuring results must be a part of any social media engagement program. Social media makes it easier to keep track of facts about customers. Having the information is not enough. You have to act on it. You have to engage with your audiences.
