Let’s go over some tips to help increase your outreach, grow your target audience and become a social media master. Customer Retention and Tone of Voice Social media engagement is a great way to reach new customers and retain old ones. But you want to make sure you're not invading people's feeds and annoying them. Make sure you're engaging professionally and respectfully. Not only is maintaining your current customers is actually less expensive than trying to snag new ones, but the return on investment is statistically higher. So, what’s the secret for retaining customers? There’s no set formula that works for everyone, but one of the best ways to keep your clients coming back for the long-term is to create a bond with them. Thanks to social media, getting to know your customers is now easier than ever. You can even reach out to customers personally if they’ve liked or recommended your business on any of the social media platforms. This might seem small, but it’s things like this that allow your customers to bond with the people inside your organization and overall, the organization itself. Different platforms typically have different types of people who use them. For example, LinkedIn might have more of your “buttoned-up” clients so you should tailor your messages to have a professional tone, while your Facebook audience might respond to a more conversational tone. Get a feel for which type of customers spend time on each platform and then adjust your messaging accordingly. Tone isn’t the only aspect to think about when building a social media strategy. You also need to take into account the most popular times your audience is online. Overall, weekdays are more popular across the board as opposed to weekends when people are spending time with their families or taking part in activities away from their phones or computers. Flip over to your organization’s analytics for their Facebook page. It’s a treasure trove of information that will help you hone down the audience you want to engage with on that platform. You should have analytics to each business account you have on each platform that will give you lots of information to work with as you decide when is the best time to post your messages. The more you engage with your audience, the better the connection you have with them to understand their wants and needs. Why Paid Ads Might Get You More Bang for Your Buck Social media marketing has both an organic and a paid ad side. Let’s face it. Organic ads are only going to get you so far and it’s a fine line between being engaging and being annoying. Directly messaging people who haven’t expressed interest can have negative results. With 70% of people in the U.S. engaging on a minimum of at least one social channel, you’ll want to consider using paid ads to reach a wider audience and to engage directly with existing customers. When you double down on your social media presence it can easily turn some people off. Plus, when people continually see the same ads or messages every day, they become easier and easier to ignore. This is why paid ads might be the answer you’re looking for. With paid ads, you are able to break down your desired audience into more specific terms through demographic information. Platforms use the information they have from individual profiles to congregate an audience that’s more likely to be interested in your organization. This helps you avoid essentially wasting your outreach on people who aren’t likely to buy your product and get you in front of the people you want. Find the Right Influencers Social media influencers seem to be a dime a dozen these days. Everywhere you turn, from Instagram to Youtube, you see someone promoting one product or another. Influencers can be a great asset to have in your arsenal. They already have a devoted audience which translates to lots of views for your product if they decide to promote it. The tricky part is finding influencers that are right for your organization. Finding influencers in your niche is key. Do your research to find out which influencers relate to your audience and seem like a natural fit to promote your product. When you have a list of people, begin to make yourself visible to them - subscribe to their blogs, follow them on social media, and share their posts. This puts you in their line of sight and gives you a better chance of them actually promoting your product. Once you’ve created a bit of a relationship, reach out to them. If you have a particularly relevant blog post, ask them to share it. If your goal is to guest blog on their site, look for the process on how to do that somewhere on their site. It will take some time but the payoff is worth the work. Clear Social Media Policies Improving your social media outreach doesn’t rest solely on the shoulders of the messages you and your team send out. Maintaining a professional social media account has a lot of nuances. You can make things easier by establishing clear social media policies for your team. This leaves little room for error and, as a whole, your entire social media strategy will run smoother. On top of that, it helps keep your brand image consistent across all social media channels. But what policies should you put in place? There are lots of points to consider when creating a social media policy but as the top of the list should be specific guidelines on how your organization uses social media. This can include which team members own which social media accounts, strategies for digital media planning, monitoring accounts and more. No matter where you start, creating an easy to understand social media policy will assist in keeping everything else in your social media strategy running smoothly and without a hitch.
About the author:
Frankie Wallace is a recent graduate from the University of Montana. Wallace currently resides in Boise, Idaho.
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