With more than 2 billion active social media users globally, your company is in an excellent position of showcasing your brand to your customer and engaging with them. A strong social media presence can make your brand the preferred brand which can increase your reach and improve customer loyalty.Social media is becoming home to many businesses and if used properly it can help to level the playing field for both small and large businesses. Every business has its own unique way of engaging with its customers.
Engagement isn’t a simple process, it requires an effective social media strategy that can increase the value of your business online. You also have to have a deep understanding of your target audience and commitment to get your customers interacting with your brand. Creating and delivering personalized content can be difficult if you’re not even sure when the right time to post it is.
As a business, you need to keep up with your customers and with the right strategy and tools, you can be effective in engaging with your customers on social media. Here are some easy ways you can do that.
Respond quickly to customer questions and complaints
If you have a huge social media following, it can be difficult to interact with all of them, but making an effort to quickly respond to your customer queries, questions, and comments can help increase engagement and brand loyalty. It’s also a good way of starting a conversation and quickly dealing with negative situations that can damage your brand’s reputation.
Add more value
Social media platforms like LinkedIn help you to add more value to your blog posts by sharing tips, information, news, or teaching. This way you get to establish yourself and your brand as experts in your niche or in a particular subject and also genuinely help people with your content. People will appreciate your shared advice and give visibility to your message and expertise. You can post a link to your other social media accounts to increase traffic to the original post which encourages clicks-throughs, an attractive title, an attention-grabbing preview image, and a short comment.
Create compelling graphics
Attractive and easy-to-understand graphics are part of the tools you can use in social media to help you tell a story with imagery and text. You can link the graphics to a particular article on your website which can easily get 50 followers within a few minutes of posting it on various social media platforms. Graphics stand out in a crowd of dozens of news feeds and provide a unique opportunity to share. A high-quality image with a short and well-constructed caption can boost customer engagement.
Stick to a publishing schedule
For you to develop a successful social media strategy, you have to be consistent. With all the tasks you have to perform, you may find that weeks have flown by and you haven’t published a post or even sent out a tweet. That’s why you need to commit to a schedule because your target audience is counting on you to deliver relevant content at the right time that will keep them engaged. To make your work easier, there are some tools like Hubspot and Buffer you can use that will help you schedule your posts across different platforms, come up with your social media calendar, and keep it running efficiently.
Maintain a consistent voice
Consistency is not only required in timing but also in providing a uniformed voice and message of your brand across all social media channels. If the brand persona on your website, social media, and emails isn’t consistent, you risk alienating and confusing your customers. It’s much easier to maintain a consistent voice if you’re operating a small business, but as it grows bigger it’s important to make sure the brand’s message remains the same especially if you outsource your content marketing and social media services.
Make your content more accessible
Making your social media content accessible to people with disabilities is another way of improving customer engagement. Using image descriptions to describe the images that you post on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram help people with low vision and those who use screen readers. They also help people with cognitive disabilities who have difficulty in understanding why a particular image was posted. You can use thoughtful image descriptions that will give all your customers a better experience.
Also including captions at the bottom of videos can help people with hearing loss or people with cognitive conditions like autism, people who aren’t native speakers of the language used in the video, or those from different regions. Viewers who don’t want to watch the video at that time or don’t have earphones can use the captions to understand the video.
Be real and authentic
Social media marketers work hard to come up with the right words that will attract customers when all they need to do is be authentic. Every interaction with a customer is your opportunity to show the authenticity of your brand. Social media is a platform where people come together to socialize not to be sold to and they can detect a sales pitch from a distance. For this to work, you need to understand how social media users talk that means you need to increase your engagement or you will end up being ignored.
Excellent customer service
People will be more drawn to your business if it’s friendly and is responsive on social media. If your customers feel that your business is rude and has a negative attitude towards them, you can lose many customers or have a social media crisis. Creating excellent customer service at all times will give customers a reason to have a relationship with your business.
Final thoughts
Engaging with your customers on social media can be challenging because your followers are exposed to a lot of content that can make it difficult to get their attention. By being authentic, responding to their questions and complaints while adding more value and maintaining a consistent voice for your brand will encourage your customers to interact with your brand.
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