Improving Customer Engagement with Social Media
Significant customer engagement on social media isn’t easy to produce. There is no one answer or strategy for every business. It never hurts to examine what you’re doing now to see what’s working and what isn’t.
With the right strategy and a good understanding of your audience, you can get customers to interact with your brand through various social channels.
Successful social media engagement relies on many factors. You often need to communicate the right content on the right platform at the right time, making it difficult to provide a one size fits all strategy.
Here are just a few tactics that can be employed to improve customer engagement with social media!
Focus on the right platform
Each social media platform has its own identity. After establishing your target market, ensure you’re using the correct platform to engage with your customers.
Once you figure out which platforms your customers are using the most, you’ll know that’s where you need to be.
For example, businesses often attempt to engage with their customers on Twitter when their main audience is on Facebook.
Without appropriate engaging in social media listening to learn where your brand is being talked about, you mightn’t be using the right channel to engage your audience.
It’s also incredibly important to know the differences between audiences on each platform. Each platform has different demographics and content needs to be tailored to match the platform.
Often enough businesses make the mistake of using all social media platforms as equal distribution channels. While tailoring content for each separate platform is most effective, it’s often time consuming and unrealistic.
Engage regularly
As discussed in previous blog posts, great customer service is paramount. If customer service is poor it results in increased churn rates and unsatisfied customers.
Social media has become a prime way for customers to interact with brands, especially from a customer service point of view. Customers turning to social media for their complaints and inquiries. This means you’ll need to be available as much as possible.
People are more likely to voice their negative opinions of a brand. Because of this, you should look towards turning these type of interactions into positive moments of engagement.
When a brand has fast responses to customer queries on social media, it demonstrates high quality customer care.
With the goal of getting back to customers as quickly as possible you can both improve customer engagement online and increase customer satisfaction.
Create the right content
Much like the different channels chosen, the engagement rates of the different content format will vary greatly.
Trying a variety of different formats and seeing what resonates with your audience then gearing a campaign around the top performing formats.
For example, video content may gain the highest amount of impressions, whereas infographics, news or humour may drive a higher level of customer engagement.
Regardless of the format chosen, don’t forget to make sure your branding is consistent across your content!
Timing
Your social media audience might not be engaging at the times you’re posting. If a shop only opens when everyone’s in bed, they’ll have very few customers. Social media is very similar in that regard.
Regardless of the high quality you’re putting out, if you’re posting when no one’s looking, no one will see it.
Conducting original research on your social media audience will give you a far greater insight into the right times for posting content. No audience is the same, so there isn’t a specific time that works for every business.
Ultimately social media is all about building relationships. Listening, interacting and testing out what’s right for your audience is key to creating a great customer relationship and in turn improving your customer engagement.
If you’re interested in finding out more regarding customer engagement contact us today on +353 1 8041298 or click on the link below to be brought to our contact form!
