This guest post is by Monica Wilson at Growr
Having a social media presence is quite beneficial to business organizations. Social networking sites provide the perfect platform for constant interaction with your customers, it fosters new relationships with potential customers and allows you to listen and respond to their feedback. If you have already grown your social media audience substantially, the next question that you should seek to answer is how to best speak to these people in a way that guarantees better conversions and improved brand awareness. Here are seven approaches you should consider:
Prioritize Social Listening
Many businesses are quick to open and run social media channels, yet not as many understand the value of social listening. Social listening allows brands to get an understanding of how people view their brand. Browsing social networking platforms looking for all your brand mentions will help you understand what people feel about your brand, what they like about your products and services and what they think you’re doing wrong.
On Twitter, for example, only 9% of Twitter users add the “@” sign when mentioning a brand. Without browsing Twitter, therefore, you will never know what 91% of Twitter users who have interacted with your brand think about your products and services. Choosing to prioritize social listening would change that.
Experiment With Values
Social media sites give you an opportunity to do several experiments that can help you estimate the value of your followers on these platforms. For instance, a simple A/B test that compares giving your audiences some stuff for free versus giving them discounts would give you a deeper understanding of your audience’s attitudes towards free things and discounts and up to what amount of money do discounts work. These insights will help you understand how your audience views your offers and what value they place on them. Consequently, you can use this information to design better offers.
Create Unique, Valuable Insights that Come Only from You, not Your Competitors
This process takes time and is often arduous, but when you finally find certain insights you have that your competitors don’t and share them with your audience, you attach priceless value to your brand. You make your customers want to prefer your products and services to those of your competitors as well as feel the need to spread the word about them in their circles of influence.
Use the Right Tools
There are certain social media tools that make the process of social sharing, social engagement and social listening easy and straightforward. Some tools like Growr streamline the process of adding new and real followers on Instagram, HootSuite and buffer allow you to schedule your posts while Social Mention is perfect for social listening. These are just a few of the dozens upon dozens of social media tools that can help you better speak to your audiences on social networking sites.
Create an Engagement Strategy
The best way to spend your time on social media is conversing with your audiences. These conversations are the equivalent of socializing for personal profiles on these social sites. Take you time to create an engagement strategy and follow it through. Respond to conversations about your brand, offer answers to your audience about the industry, etc.
Showcase Your Social Streams
Look for the best widgets that will make it possible for you to embed your social media links and content within your website, emails and newsletters. Doing this will expose your content to new audiences also interested with your brand and its products and establishes connections that last longer than those you may have acquired using other methods like social media ads.
Speak to Your Target Customer Directly
One big mistake many brands do on social media is to talk to their audiences in a general way as if conversing with a multitude. Because social media is personal, you should speak to your audience with personalized messages that make them see that you value them enough to talk to them on a personal level. Seek to appeal to as many people as you can, but make the message resonate with your audience on a personal level.
This guest post is provided by Monica Wilson at Growr.
