Businesses worldwide have shifted focus to gathering customers on their social media platforms rather than their websites. This is because social media is crucial to the success of any company's digital marketing strategy. Despite this, many brands are not using this tool to its full potential. Although the number of "follows", "likes" and "shares" is still important, the credibility of a brand is distinguished by far more than just this. Today, social media requires a unique set of skills whereby brands need to fully understand the needs of their audience. To help you out, here are 10 social media strategies you need to implement, whether you are a young entrepreneur or a well-established brand.
Use Chatbots
A Chatbot is a digital tool that can communicate and resolve problems for your customers without the potential need for any human interruption. In addition to this, chatbots integrate with the platforms that consumers now feel most comfortable interacting through: social media. Platforms such as Chattypeople make integrating an AI-powered chatbot into your social media strategy easy. These tools allow you to create a chatbot that:
- doesn't require any coding knowledge.
- can answer customer questions.
- can take orders directly from Facebook Messenger and comments.
- Integrates with all the major payment systems.
Create a personalized experience for your customers.
Chatbots are not only a great way to automate certain everyday tasks, and if implemented properly, your chatbot will allow you to create more personalized experiences for your customers. To do this, stop linking your advertisements solely to your landing pages, and create ads that redirect your audience to a Messenger window with your chatbot. Linking ads to your chatbot will:
Break the traditional views customers have of you only trying to sell to them.
Make your customer's experience more personal.
Boost your sales.
Create a loyal fan base.
Create an efficient content marketing strategy.
Quality is key and content is no exception. Content marketing has been a prominent form of marketing for a long time and this is not set to change anytime soon. Many brands are not linking quality content with the right posting schedule and the correct frequency of posts. High-quality SEO content coupled with all the above will help you bring in the right customers at the right time. Aside from its ability to attract an organic audience, a good content marketing strategy can be implemented for free. Be sure to create a relevant hashtag strategy along with your optimized and thorough content.
Build a Community for your audience.
Although “followers” and the many other metrics are important, they are not the "be all and end all" to social media success. You need to show your audience that you are not just a robot. Integrate personality through humor and emotions into your posts so that your audience can relate to your brand. Social media is all about being social, and if your customers see the same types of posts time and time again, they will lose interest. To make your communications interactive,:
- Ask your audience questions.
- Gather their opinions on certain matters.
- Share newsworthy information rather than just information about your products or services.
- Like and share some of their posts rather than just the other way around.
- Asking them to interact directly with your posts through "likes" and "shares".
Boost your profiles with a diverse content strategy.
People respond to good imagery, fun videos, and some interesting podcasts once and awhile. Jazz up your content by using this type of media regularly. Your social media pages will look bland if all you post and share is text, so be sure to use other types of media to catch your audience's eye. This is also a great way to add a level of personality to your brand.
Use brand advocates.
The
network strength of social media allows you to amplify engagement. Even
if you’re just one person running things for your company or
collaborating with a few teammates, there are all the rest of your
colleagues, and all of the followers across your various social media
channels and accounts. If you bring the right balance of energy, thought
and friendliness to your social media engagement, it can build on
itself by others citing your content and voicing your themes in their
own engagements. Engagement is the blocking and tackling work of social
media. It certainly gets tedious at times. Your best promotional tool is the people who love your brand. Instead of focusing all your efforts on finding new customers, simply leverage your current ones and your employees. To use your employees as brand advocates, you should:
Create social media guidelines specific to your brand.
Tell your advocates about social media best practices.
Add a leader to each section of your social media advocacy plan.
Track the correct data to pinpoint areas for improvement and those that are doing well.
Create Profiles on relevant channels.
You can choose to create profiles on every social media channel available with the aim of reaching as many people as possible. While this is good, you may not reach your chosen target audience. As a result, it is key you look at your buyer personas when choosing your social media channels. For example, you won't necessarily need a LinkedIn profile if you are launching a gothic clothing brand; the same as you won't need to be on Pinterest to promote your surveillance services.
Establish a social media budget.
Social media platforms are one of, if not the most important, forms of marketing. Allocating the right budget to your social media endeavors is crucial to your success. Not only this, leveraging that budget with the right strategy will be the most cost-effective way for you to reach your chosen target audience. Because social media is used on a much more personal level, you will also find that it is a place where you can make a much deeper connection with your customers.
9. Run cross-channel campaigns.
To further engage your customers, run cross-channel campaigns across all your social media channels. Keep in mind that these campaigns are run by virtually every company today, so you will need to give yourself an edge to help you stand out from the crowd. Add an emotional component to your social media campaigns so that your audience can relate to your cause. An efficient cross-channel social media campaign will:
Tell an engaging story.
Link back to a specific landing page that will give your audience more information about your campaign.
Have a unique and memorable name coupled with relevant hashtags.
10. Tell a story by going live.
Your content will tell the story of your brand as a whole, but why not share with your audience what's happening with your company in real time? Facebook and Instagram, among other platforms, have created their own live streaming features, something that is not yet being used to its full potential by big brands. To compete with them, start using these live features before they really catch on. Live stories are a great way to:
Show your audience you are more than just a money-making machine.
Engage and inspire your customers.
Create shareable and memorable content.
Businesses worldwide are slowly becoming more preoccupied with gathering customers on their social media platforms rather than their websites. By following the 10 strategies outlined above, you'll not only set yourself up to compete with well-established brands but also create a social media plan that will withstand the test of time.
10 Rules Of Social Media Engagement
The day-to-day responsibilities of being a social media manager can be interesting. Whether you’re with an agency managing activities for multiple clients, or you’re a specialist within a large enterprise, or you’re the proprietor of a small business, we are always putting ourselves in your shoes to understand what you need to get done and how you’re doing it. We talk with customers constantly to deepen this understanding plus we also manage our own social media presence.
Social media management inbox
Applying these learnings directly to our service is one of the reasons why eClincher is so distinctive. And one of our most unique areas of functionality is our unified social inbox for engagement. Instead of toggling between tabs and columns to see different social media channels’ messages, mentions, comments and so on, we bring them all together into one feed where you can efficiently assess what’s coming in, decide what to do about it, and take immediate action. This includes direct responses, making assignments to teammates, and marking items complete. eClincher stands alone as a platform for effective social media engagement. While building that, we’ve learned some great lessons about best practices. Here is 10 of them:
Monitor all channels live
The front lines of social media include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Youtube, Pinterest, Snap, Reddit and Quora. That’s a lot of fronts to cover, and your particular circumstance may present even more. There are all sorts of incoming fire. You’ve got direct messages, comments, reposts, linked mentions, unlinked mentions, misspelled mentions. Much of it may not be important or require action on your part. But a single overlooked item could wind up being an enormous missed opportunity or a mushrooming crisis.
Maybe it’s your dream customer with some follow-up questions posted in response to an interesting piece you put up on LinkedIn, or someone with a big following who takes to twitter in order to complain about an experience with your business. It’s your responsibility to survey all of these channels in real-time to quickly respond to what’s important. These engagement priorities of eClincher users have been the biggest factor in our delivering and advancing our unified social inbox. You can also use our software to monitor terms, even common misspellings of your identity, in order to make sure nothing falls between the cracks.
Have prepared content
Responses are quickest when you’ve already pretty much put them together. We recommend keeping the most common and most important statements at the ready so they can be modified as necessary for the particular circumstance and then dispatched when a need arises. Methodologies can include a shared document, tagging effective responses to reference for future use (which you can do in our unified social inbox), or keeping a repository of drafts at the ready (which we also support in our software)
Address points of substance
Whatever’s incoming results from some consideration and effort by the person providing it. Whether it’s praising or criticizing you, and whether you feel the contents are merited or off-base, you really do at least owe some consideration and effort in your response. Avoid mere platitudes and think about what’s been put forward. Consider the motivations and reply in kind. While you’ll, of course, want to steer the conversation toward your priorities and objectives, the best way to do that is with respect for what has been posited to you and why.
Show some personality
In your reading up to here we’ve encouraged you to be substantial and respectful. But be yourself too! While particular considerations may be required to manage a particular relationship or solve some problem, your brand is never wholly removed from any interaction, and it’s particularly important if that interaction is visible to others in a social media network, like participation in a comment thread. If the explainer video on your homepage has jokes, be funny! If your blog posts include deep thoughts, be profound! Always embrace the tone and intention of the incoming content, but always also be true to yourself in your response.
Engage with others’ social media presences
The engagement you earn is a major measure of your social media effectiveness. One way to earn it, is to recognize that this is a two-way street, and engage with others and their posts too. When you like someone’s content, click the button to signify that, or repost it along with your own statement of endorsement. When you’ve got something to say, provide a comment. Be especially considerate of those who engage with you, or people whose engagement with your content you want to cultivate.
Defuse controversy
There will be trolls. There will also be parties with legitimate gripes. And there will be people in your community who aren’t sure which is which. Putting yourself out there and engaging actively means dealing with what comes back at you without controlling it. Sometimes it will be negative. But you can influence the tone and show yourself as an honorable character. If someone attacks you, get up from your chair and stroll around a bit to recollect yourself. Then think about how to react.
There are several options consider. You might acknowledge some disagreement and objectively state your side. Be aware that this can come across passive-aggressively, but you should avoid any impression of trying to escalate the exchange into a more bitter argument. You can also ask that the interaction move offline, or directly message the party yourself to try effecting that. The nuclear option is to block or mute. You might also just ignore the negative content. This can work perfectly fine when it’s sufficiently outrageous as to basically discredit itself.
Be consistent
This is a good one to follow the defuse controversy one. It’s especially important how you engage with those who approach you negatively or controversially. Consider an online insult that you choose to ignore, versus another where you engage in debate, and how those choices that you’ve made may come across to someone as revealing about you. It’s also important to be consistent in your other interactions, besides the complaints and insults. Consistency makes your own life simpler and also cues your communities about what to expect from you. If someone sees witty engagements by you, and messages you something funny, they probably expert a joke with your reply.
Make sure there’s documentation of what your practices are to hold yourself true. This also esures there’s team-wide understanding of your social media efforts being collaborative.
Integrate social media and other systems
The natural department for social media might have once clearly seemed marketing, but it’s now relevant for everything including customer support, sales, recruiting, employee relations and investor relations. The social media specialists within a company are generally not going to be expert in every one of these areas, so it’s important to have effective channels of communication and collaboration with others. This includes integration with other key systems such as the CRM for driving sales.
Get retrospective
There are a lot of social media networks, there are multiple kinds of engagements within each one, there are many topics and tones that arise in these conversations, and there may be a bunch of people involved in managing it all. Each specific interaction is a tactical exercise, so maintaining a solid and consistent strategic orientation can be challenging. Even if there’s a plan in place about what to say and how to say it, that plan may get outdated based on how themes and conversations evolve.
For that reason it’s important to periodically unplug from live social media engagement, at least for a few hours. Then, assess how things are going and where they could be improved. Consider in the context of what’s more broadly going on with the organization. Revise and update the relevant documents, and get back to it.
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