Human beings love interactions; we are social beings after all. No wonder social media is trying to capitalize on our socializing nature. Social engagement could be both offline or online, with people meeting each other and sharing thoughts feelings and emotions over a spoken or written conversation.
Social Engagement is a new advertising tool being adopted by businesses, as they move away from the unilateral style of traditional advertising and learning to interact with customers and forge long term relationships with them.
What makes Social Engagement so Popular?
Every consumer loves to feel special. Actively engaging with your customers on social media is an easy and viable way to make each and every one of your customers feel special all the time. Responding quickly to social media reviews and chatter is not a very difficult task, especially when you consider how it makes a consumer feel valued. Even as they protest loudly, customers place their trust in you to offer them a solution.
Engaging with customers has traditionally been an offline task, but social media engagement has made it simpler yet more efficient. Stop trying to delight your customer from Harvard Business Review reports that customers resent having to contact the company relentlessly to have their problems solved and having to describe their issues repeatedly. Understandably, offering a solution to a problem was a little more complicated in the olden times than it is now.
Social Media Engagement Benefits
If social media itself is a boon for marketers; social media engagement adds to it. What can be better than garnering attention for your brand from a hundred thousand people, across the globe? Social media engagement lets you interact with them and to take them into confidence, staying agnostic to time zones, geographies, gender or race.
Social media engagement has more than a few benefits to offer:
Cost Effectiveness
Social media reaches a vast majority of people. Engaging people from around the world via traditional means can get logistically tricky and expensive. But, interacting with an audience base on social media practically costs nothing.
Boosts Brand Awareness
Brand responsiveness makes customers feel valued and happy. Keeping customers happy would earn your company, brand advocates and more sales in the long run. Positive word-of-mouth is the best sales pitch one could wish for. Social media engagement helps bring in more sales and spread your company’s fame and that too organically.
Social Customer Care
In the world of social media-savvy people today, most customers turn to social media to denounce or praise a company’s services. Social media engagement is a quick and hassle-free mode to get your customer’s attention. A quick response to a negative comment could save the day, while positive feedback can be broadcasted as a badge of honor.
Customer Retention
One of the primary reasons for marketers to opt for social media marketing is to gain brand awareness and trust from the audience, building a potentially loyal customer base. When a customer sees daily activity on the company profile, with proactive answers to customer issues and questions posted there, with follow-up feedback, they naturally feel drawn to reckon with you. That could be the beginning of building a large customer base.
Improve Your Social Media Engagement Strategy
Imagine how you would engage with people at a party or a get-together. You chat with people, exchange information and so on. Social media engagement for a company is on similar lines with different objectives. You build your presence online, chat with people, exchange information – crucial information that can help you get a sense of customer perception. Also, you share information with customers facing issues when using your product or service.
Easier said than done. Building an engaging presence online might sound easy but can be a tough job. However, even the toughest of jobs have a starting point. Here are some steps you can take to slowly build and improve upon your social media engagement efforts:
Social Listening
Listening to social media chatter to understand how people perceive you or talk about you is extremely important before you initiate a conversation with them. Social media marketing runs smoothly if you listen first, plan your strategy and then engage with your promoters as well as detractors. Without a plan, you might end up disrupting the social reputation that already exists for your brand and create more problems for yourself by taking a defensive or belligerent tone, as many businesses have found to their cost.
Start the Conversation
Once you know the facts and figures about what your customer sentiment is like, you can initiate real conversations, using a respectful tone and adopting a positive attitude, aimed at problem resolution. Social media engagement does not necessarily mean a customer has to pose a question/problem and you would then continue the conversation. You could yourself start a casual social media feedback session or a Facebook live Q&A session or a similar forum.
Identify Brand Advocates
In the initial stages of social listening, you may have found some supporters who like your brand’s products or services. Identify these people and engage with them more often to turn them into your brand’s advocates. They are like your brand ambassadors, the happier they are the more they influence people to join you.
Events, Giveaways, Social Posts and Activities
The best thing about social media is that it’s like an ongoing fest, like a Tomorrowland festival, around the year. Someone or the other is hosting a giveaway or an online event, or a webinar and so on. This attracts attention and traffic to your cause. It also helps to improve your overall brand image.
Response Time and Receptivity
Last but not least, there’s a golden rule of social media engagement. Be receptive to your customers and respond in time’. A quick reply shows your interest in the customer and might stave off a disaster. The longer you take to reply, the longer the negative comment stays online. Others might see and change their minds about your brand and think of you as an uncaring and unresponsive brand.
Once you have started on your social media marketing journey, it is essential that you take care of all its aspects like social listening and social engagement. Attention to such details could add up to make you successful on your social media marketing efforts.