Social media is a word that gets bandied about a lot in marketing circles. The thing is, though some businesses seem to have a natural knack for it, for a lot of others it's incredibly hard to use correctly. They can’t seem to get the ball rolling and for some reason, their audience stays small.
What, they’re no doubt wondering, are they doing wrong? Well, it turns out that you can do things wrong in a lot of ways. Here we’re going to talk about some ideas that you can use that might well make the difference between an effective strategy and on that leaves you trying to win customers offline instead.
Don’t talk to them. Talk with them.
The first thing many businesses get wrong is that they forget what social media is for. It is for being social. And so, people are mainly there to connect with their friends and have conversations with people that matter to them. Sure, sometimes they might be lured away by a product, but that’s not the main goal.
So use that. Instead of trying to market a product to your audience, see if you can’t get them into a conversation instead. If you can create a lively online community where people are talking with you and look to you to give them interesting ideas and content, then they’ll actually seek you out on social media. When that happens, marketing other stuff to them will become a whole lot easier.
New customers aren’t better customers.
Another thing about social media is that it works better if you focus at least some of your attention on the people you already have and know. For one thing, they’re easier to reach, for another thing they’ve already demonstrated an interest in what you’re doing and are therefore much easier to engage.
This matters more than you might think. After all, the amount of engagement we see with a social media account implicitly communicates the value of that account to us. So, if you see content that is getting hundreds of likes, we’re going to give it more attention than if it only has half a dozen.
In other words, ‘take care of your current customers and they’ll take care of your future ones’. It’s not totally true, but it’s close enough.
Oh yeah, and customers you already have are 67% more valuable than new ones. So there is that.
Use human faces
We actually have a subsystem in the brain that actively searches for human faces. And when it finds one, it pulls the eye over to wherever it might be in our environment. In other words, the human face naturally grabs the attention of your audience.
And yet lots of companies seem to prefer using their logo to using a human face for their sites. That’s just not a good idea. Companies are already abstract entities without a real human identity. Why would we want to make matters worse?
Instead, have a human face to represent your company – particularly if you can find somebody that’s cute or attractive to your target audience. This will subconsciously cue them to actually engage with you instead of just listen to you passively.
Target your social media correctly
There are now plenty of ways to personalize your ad campaigns. For example, on Facebook, you can set it up so that the people who have engaged with your brand in the past and people like them become a new group that you can target your ads at. This is a fantastic way to make sure that you actually reach out to people who are interested in your brand and will significantly boost the engagement that you get per dollar spent.
So make use of strategies like these, so that your money does not get sent off to ping people in some far corner of the world who don’t care about your brand – like trying to sell a best writing advisor to a person that is illiterate – but instead gets used to actually create a connection with people who will actually care about what you’re doing.
Don’t just market your site
Instead, offer up interesting quotes, pictures and other things that your audience will like. In this way, when they see one of your posts, they won’t automatically think it’s you trying to get them to your site again. Instead, it might well be something interesting that they actually want to read.
What’s more, many social media platforms decide how many people they’re going to show your new post to based on how much engagement you’re getting overall. So, if you can boost your average engagement by giving your audience stuff that they enjoy and will react to, then more people are going to be exposed to the stuff you’re actually looking to sell as well.
Reward actively engaged customers
If you there is somebody who has shown a lot of enthusiasm for your brand, then make sure you let them know you appreciate it. There are many forms this can take. You can simply give them an enthusiastic thank you or you can even give them vouchers or give them something for free.
People want to feel appreciated and are going to be very grateful to any company that recognizes what they’re doing for them.
In fact, when this is done correctly it’s possible to turn somebody who is engaged with your brand into somebody who actually is a brand advocate. And those can be incredibly valuable as they give you a free word of mouth advertisement. And all it took was a little bit of returned enthusiasm on your part!
Keep at it
Social media takes time. You need to build up recognition among your audience so that know who you are and they respect what you’ve got to say. If you can do that then initially people will stop scrolling when they see something that you’ve got to say.
From there they might well move on to actually interacting with what you’re doing. And only after that will they become brand advocates and the rest of it.
In other words, you might be making inroads without actually seeing that many results yet. Then, suddenly, you experience a cascade with many people jumping onboard at the same time. Don’t give up before that happens.