Interacting With Your Customers Using Social Media

Written by Alice Daveis Tuesday, 23 August 2011 05:20

Cost free marketing that can reach thousands and generate real customer loyalty sounds to many more like a pipe dream or a pitch for a multi-level marketing product than a realistic proposition. But the truth is that businesses which have the ability to create a buzz around their product or service can easily do this using social media networks such as Twitter or Facebook. The only potential cost would be hiring a social media agency to do this for you if you are too pressed for time to learn the basics in this new form of marketing.

Cost free marketing that can reach thousands and generate real customer loyalty sounds to many more like a pipe dream or a pitch for a multi-level marketing product than a realistic proposition. But the truth is that businesses which have the ability to create a buzz around their product or service can easily do this using social media networks such as Twitter or Facebook. The only potential cost would be hiring a social media agency to do this for you if you are too pressed for time to learn the basics in this new form of marketing.

Firstly a realistic consideration of who these networks can reach needs to be taken into account. Both Facebook and Twitter, but especially the latter, tend to have greater penetration among the young and relatively affluent. They both however have only small followings among older audiences and those with less connectivity. Businesses that are suited for engagement with users who are frequent users of the sites can however have their marketing messages spread quickly to large numbers.

Facebook meanwhile has a larger proportion of those online logging into its website regularly. Their engagement with brands depends much more on personally following or 'liking' companies as unlike Twitter there is no easy way for users to repost marketing messages by companies. This means that Facebook is much more useful at retaining existing customers or those interested in your brand than developing new customers.

The correct implementation of a marketing campaign on the networks is key for growth of your followers. Without a carefully considered marketing campaign your tweets and posts can go unread as only your already loyal customers will be engaged with your accounts. For many this is a reason to turn towards a social media agency for advice. Examples of promoting engagement which have been successful for small businesses include low-value product give-aways and competitions that focus around rewarding promoting the brand. Using a site like competwition for Twitter give-aways can dramatically increase the number of ways to promote your brand. There are risks with these however and thus factors such as how attractive an offer is and if the dynamics of the offer will lead to followers promoting the offer to their friends or keeping it themselves.

A small Oxford-based chain of ice cream parlours began giving away small numbers of low value ice-cream products to the first few followers of its tweets who showed staff the tweet offering a free product. The cost of such an offer was minimal and often would pay for itself through the purchase of other products by the customer or those who accompanied them. The main effect however was to create a reason for people to follow the brand - followers who weren't able to benefit from the offer directly would retweet it to their friends, who would then start following the cafe and lead to more potential customers seeing the offers and decide to give it ago.

Not every company has a product that can be given away however and for these, competition to win a higher value of product can be more successful. A record shop gained a large positive brand recognition among thousands of Facebook users in its area by implementing a giveaway competition that engaged with the social aspects of these networks. They took their mascot out into a high street and got people to enter the competition by standing next to it and having their photo taken. These would be uploaded to the record shop's Facebook page and the users would tag themselves. The person who got the largest number of their friends to like the photo of themselves with the mascot would win 250 worth of music. The campaign was successful because it encouraged people to promote the brand with a potentially large reward for someone they knew but with little effort required on their part. As the entrants to the competition were limited, there was no disincentive to promote others.

Both social networks can be hard to manage correctly for the inexperienced marketer, which is why many small businesses choose to use a social media agency rather than study the practice themselves. Common issues include over-posting, which can appear to users as spam. This problem is much more a feature of Twitter than Facebook as the latter automatically limits the number of posts a user sees based on their engagement with the brand. Over-posting can lead to users ending their social media engagement with the brand which can damage a company's reputation.

Social networks also provide great feedback from your customers. This however needs to be managed carefully in order to avoid negative feedback and to deal with questions in a way which builds a positive relationship with customers. As you can't be online twenty-four hours a day, outsourcing this work to a social media agency can be a useful solution.