5 Tips for Social Media Success

Fast becoming an effective channel to reach to your target audience, social media can't be ignored any more. In this post, I am going to share with you 5 tips that will ensure you find success on social media.

Choose your medium:

Whether you are a small brand or big brand, you don’t have to be everywhere on social media. If you are going to leverage social media to benefit your business, you need a strong strategy in place. Social Media is not about creating accounts on different networking sites. An intense amount of research is required even before marking your territory on the networking sites. For instance, it makes sense for a music band to use YouTube, MySpace and Sound Cloud as primary platforms for promotion. But does it make sense for a bank or a cement manufacturer to use something even close to Sound Cloud?

Choose your medium of communication very wisely. Your online activity will reflect directly on your offline efforts. Ultimately the audience you connect with is also the audience who are going to buy your product.

Start by asking yourself questions like:

Does your brand need social media?

What audience am I targeting?

What platforms can I find my audience on?

How do I engage my audience?

Finally, no one wants to see every nuts and bolts manufacturer on networking sites.

Listen:

When people encounter a flawed product they do not immediately go back to vendor and ask for a replacement. In today’s world, people make noise. They will post updates on Facebook, Twitter, and Blog. They will complain on several forums. They will try to get the brand’s attention one way or the other.

In case of bigger brands, same is also true for unhappy employees.

There are a lot of listening tools such as Radian 6 or Simplify 360 available. The tools can help a great deal in monitoring conversations across several platforms. Identify the problem areas, unhappy customers and complaining employees. Talk to them, answer their queries, and solve their problems. Then go back and share the experience with your audience. Encourage the satisfied customers to share their valuable feedback on your page.

Simultaneously, you can also create a single platform to make tracking easier. For instance, a complain box or a review tab on Facebook page or a customer care handle on twitter will encourage at least 50% unhappy customers to share their problems directly with the brand.

Listening will not only help negate the noise created by unhappy customers, but also help regain customer loyalty.

Call to Action:

There is nothing worse than a one way communication. A million fans on your page are good for nothing if your fan-to-brand communication is close to zero. If your content is all about you and your opinions, the audience interest in your brand will die sooner than later. As a brand, audience interest should be above your own. Give opinions, but also ask for opinions. Remember that you are not that guy standing outside a busy station handing pamphlets to everybody passing you. You are the guy who is interested in the interests of his audience.

Be it Facebook, Twitter, or any other platform, if there is no call to action then you are not connecting with your audience. And if you are not connecting with your audience, it isn’t social media.

Cover Events:

Audience is very much interested in what goes on in and around the company. Covering events live digitally helps generate buzz. If the topic is interesting, you will find a lot of brand-customer conversation happening. This conversation is an apt way to understand the requirement of your customer, indentify your flaws and better yourself.

You can always generate a report at the end of the event to conclude the sentiments of the audience. This will help the brand prepare better for the next event.

Integrate Social Media with the events to generate pre, during and post event buzz. Share results with the audience along with event photos, videos and quotes/interviews from influencers at the event.

Feed the content slowly and wisely and see the effect.

Cross promotion:

So your Facebook page is a success and your Twitter audience loves you. But does your Facebook audience know about your twitter activity? The strategy applied to Facebook and Twitter may be different, but there is no need to keep the two audiences separate, unless you are cheating on both.

Share your Twitter existence on Facebook and give them a good reason to follow you on Twitter. Simply saying “Follow Us” is not creative. Do the same on Twitter and other platforms. Let them know you are here to help them wherever they are.

There are several application available to cross promote your social activities. For instance, use widgets on Blogs and Facebook.

Promote your social media activities via mailers. Let them know of your presence and request them to join you.

Remember, Sharing is Caring.

Fans can be bought using media buys and Google banners, but their loyalty is something you have to earn.

Image Source Webtreats