How To Take The Right Approach With Social Media For Business
There are many benefits of using social media for business…it increases customer engagement, provides you a platform to get feedback from loyal customers and helps generate a dialogue between your business and the public. To use social media effectively, you need to take the right approach. The tips below will help you maximize your social media potential.
Treat Social Media Like A Relationship
People want to interact with other people and social media is one way for them to do so. Treat your social media updates not as free advertising but rather as a way of generating relationships with your customers.
Update regularly with a casual tone, using humor when appropriate and respond to all comments left by your customers. Taking these steps will build trust, which is the most important aspect of the psychology of social media. Once you have established a relationship with your customers, you will unlock the many other benefits of social media for business.
Make Your Posts Memorable
If you look at a typical Twitter stream, you will find that there are a lot of retweets from their connections. Those retweets range from quick jokes and clever one-liners to inspirational posts or articles that really helped them with something. If you want to get the most traction using social media for business, you need to make posts that stick with people from time to time. However, don’t overdo it by posting endless quotes all day – that gets old fast!
Keep your posts memorable and on-point but punctuate it with the occasional topical joke or profound statement. This will help people see the person behind the business and feel more compelled to share that and other posts, which will inevitably put you on the public radar much faster than you would with a more traditional marketing style.
If possible, try to make as much of your content as visual as possible. Infographics, videos and other visualized forms on content tend to fair well and get the highest amount of shares. This recent LinkedIn infographic was shared almost 2000 times in under two weeks!
Always Give More Than You Receive
Just as people tend to tune out when you make a conversation totally about yourself, they will ignore you if you make your social media feed only about your business. You will fair well if you fall back on using the Law of Reciprocity in social media: give to others and they will give back to you in kind.
Share posts from others that you find entertaining or interesting. Mention specific users in your posts. Comment and like other posts that interest you, even if they aren’t directly connected to your business. These steps show your social media page as something more than just a marketing tool and it will bring others to you so they can engage in the conversation.
Be Genuine
Perhaps the most important way of reaping the full benefits of social media for business is to be genuine in your posts and comments. If you’re not very good at humor, don’t force jokes just to make yourself seem funny and avoid blindly following trends that don’t resonate with you.
It is more important to show yourself to be a real human being who is sincere in your posts than to try to hit on all of the tips provided for using social media for business. Online, your business is essentially a person. Let your company’s personality show just as though you were introducing it to friends.
The important thing to remember is that social media is effectively a conversation with your customers. The only way to reap the benefits of social media for business is to treat your customers respectfully and to let your personality show through. If you do this, you will have a great deal of online success.
