Are you looking for new ways to connect with your customers? Are you having trouble communicating with your best clients in an increasingly tech-crazed world? Have you thought about leveraging social media for your communication strategy?
If you want to increase the effectiveness of your communications and reach new customers, then it’s time to begin learning how to harness the power of social media. These top three expert tips will show you how:
Create Interactive Video Messaging
Social media platforms such as Facebook are increasingly allowing live video feeds to take prominence in user news feeds. Why not use that to your advantage? Launch a Facebook Live event at your company: Go behind the scenes of an event, do a quick Q&A on the showroom floor, demo a product. Give your customers access to your product and an exclusive look at your brand via a live video, and they’ll reward you by listening, commenting, sharing, and maybe even buying.
Affirm and Congratulate
On a social media platform like Twitter, there is the great opportunity to identify your social influencers and your customers and to offer them a simple congratulations or thanks.
For example, create a running list of customers who have Twitter accounts along with their birthdays. When their special day comes along on the calendar, tweet a Happy Birthday message out to them. This is one easy but worthwhile way to create connections with your customer base. Everyone likes to be told “Happy Birthday,” and you’re making that customer feel extra special by publicly wishing them well. They’ll be impressed you didn’t let their special day slip away!
Save the Ask
Many of today’s social media platforms are punishing brands who use sales copy or calls to action for event registrations or product promotions. That’s because social media companies want brands to pay for post exposure.
If you want to reach your audience and get the most reach combined with the most engagement, you’ll have to be willing to hold off on your big ask and instead veil your motives with a really great story.
Tell a quick anecdote about how your product or service changed a customer’s life. Allow a customer to take over your social account for a day and reveal a day in his or her life. Post a video that relates to the core of what you do, but have it be a news video not one you produce. All of these examples are ones that Facebook, for example, prioritizes because they are not gimmicky or promotional.
By saving the ask until another time, you’re building trust with your customers and letting them know you prioritize providing them with helpful content and news that they wouldn’t be able to get anywhere else. They’ll appreciate that, and they’ll be more willing to list when you finally do ask them to buy something. Also, use closed captioning services to allow your videos to reach a broader audience and meet the needs of more people.
When in doubt, cloak your ask in a story. Make your call to action soft at the end. Focus on the person and how the product or service has made that person’s life more meaningful.
Conclusion
In conclusion, in 2017 social media will continue to be a main vehicle for communication in the business world. You’ll increasingly see new multimedia ads and strategies for using social to convert sales in the new year as well, and these are strategies you’ll want to consider as you build new communication channels with your clients.
Keep this quick guide of expert tips handy as you navigate your new year, and keep coming back to these three core principles as a way to inform your action plan and to tweak your current social strategy. Starting a conversation, and some buzz for your company, is a lot easier than you thought! Social can open up the way for you.
