You already know that Facebook, Twitter, and other popular social media sites can help you to reach hundreds of thousands of potential customers—often for free! But when it’s time to post, do you find yourself at a loss for what to say in 140 characters or fewer? We can help! We’re here with five hot pointers for your social media strategy. Let’s take a look at how you can keep your followers happy … and attract new ones.
Keep it Real
It might sound obvious, but when you’re posting to Facebook or Twitter, resist the urge to make wildly exaggerated claims about your brand, your people, and your products. The users reading your statuses and tweets weren’t born yesterday, and they’ll see through any obvious bravado. Instead, provide them with information they’ll really value—like updates about product releases, sales, and handy ways to use your merchandise. How can you emphasize how successful your brand is without the dreaded #humblebrag? Try sharing quotes, pictures, and other content from highly satisfied customers, as there’s nothing more powerful than a great user review!
Stay True to Your Brand
When it’s so easy to fiddle with your social media pages’ photos and written content, it can be tempting to give yourself a makeover every other week. While a beautiful new profile photo featuring your latest product release can attract the right kind of attention, be sure your message isn’t getting lost. Frequently changing your company name or logo design confuses some customers and prompts others to question the quality of your goods or services. Those changes should happen rarely, if at all. In general, keep any updates to your profile unobtrusive, relevant, and in line with your overall message.
Proofread Carefully
You may be rolling your eyes at this suggestion, but you’d be surprised at what an impact bad spelling and poor grammar can have on your followers’ perception of you. Be sure words are properly spelled, sentences are grammatically correct, and punctuation is appropriate. This applies to the content on your profile page, as well as your status updates and tweets.
Share Fresh, Useful Content
This point touches on the first one we made: too much yakking about yourself gets boring. Social media users are looking for material they can read, enjoy, and share, whether it’s informative, exciting, validating or just plain funny. Talking about how great your latest product is isn’t nearly as helpful as a quick run-down of your customers’ favorite uses for it. If this very blog post were all about how we’re social media geniuses, you probably would have stopped reading by now. These five useful pieces of advice are much more compelling—now how’s that for a real-world example?
Make it Feel Personal
Customers will follow your social media pages because they want to feel like they’re connected to you. You’ll keep them happy if you make the experience feel personal. If you have the resources, put a member of your team in charge of interaction on your social media accounts: answering customers’ questions and addressing concerns, liking users’ posts, and sharing or retweeting the great stuff people have posted about you (a picture of a smiling customer using one of your products is always a winner.) This is a great way to let your customers know that you see and care about them as individuals.
Remember, the key to successful social media marketing is building real relationships with people. Think about it: doesn’t it feel good when a business page favorites one of your tweets or replies to your post to answer your question right away? You feel confident knowing that if you ever have a problem with their goods or services, they’ll be easily accessible and ready to make things right. It’s your job to convince your followers that you’ll be there for them, too. So jump onto your social media sites and start connecting!