Social media marketing is absolutely something you should incorporate into your marketing strategy. In addition to being relatively low cost, platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are great for effectively communicating with your audience. Too often, however, businesses stop short of using the full potential of these tools and try to broadcast messages rather than engage in meaningful conversation with their audiences.
The social aspect of social media marketing is what makes it unique from traditional marketing like advertisements or e-mail blasts and direct mail. Rather than blasting one-way marketing messages to your friends, fans, and followers, focus on being social and creating meaningful conversations with them.
Here are six tips to help you engage and communicate more effectively on social media:
Be a good listener—if you’re only talking and not listening, you’re not doing a good job of engaging your audience. Interact with your fans and followers just like you would in person.
Ask questions or opinions— the responses you get may spark another conversation or lead to an improvement in a product or service.
Respond—if people take the time to post to your social networking sites, keep the conversation going with a public response. Let them know you hear them and appreciate their feedback.
Look for opportunities—sometimes the best way to get the attention of your followers is to spotlight them. Highlight some of the interesting things your customers are doing on your social networking profiles.
Be present—you can’t communicate effectively with your followers if you’re never around. That doesn’t mean you have to be online all day. Just devote a little time each day to interacting on social media.
Seek out opportunities to interact—even if your audience isn’t chatting with you online, they may be talking about you. Use the search features of social networking sites to identify what is being said. If it’s something complimentary, respond with a “thanks.” If it uncovers an opportunity for customer service to get involved, acknowledge them online and resolve the issue.
