With more than 2 billion users worldwide, social media can provide your company with a ripe opportunity to engage with customers and showcase your brand. Creating a strong social media following can also help you become the preferred brand with your customers, and significantly improve customer loyalty and reach.
To assist you with your social media efforts, we asked 13 entrepreneurs from YEC the following question:
Q. What is the best way to use social media to engage your customers and clients to improve brand loyalty and reach?
1. Focus on providing value
The single best use of your social soapbox is to provide value to people. You can do this by sharing tips, news, information, and by teaching. And when you do these things, not only are you establishing yourself or your brand as subject matter experts, you're genuinely and selflessly trying to help people. Your message and expertise will gain visibility when people appreciate and share the advice you offer. —Scott Levy, Fuel Online
2. Highlight active community members
People love to be recognized and talked about, and by sharing inspiring stories of the people who are in your audience in tandem with more general content about topics they are interested in and care about, you have a winning formula. Highlight and feature your most active community members, which will increase overall audience engagement as people see the humanity and authenticity in your brand. —Justin Faerman, Conscious Lifestyle Magazine
3. Always be authentic
Many professional social media marketers work so hard to use the right words to attract customers, when really, authenticity will get them every time! No one likes being sold to, and can detect a sales pitch a mile away. Social media became cool because it’s a platform to socialize—not sell. If you can’t talk the talk of social media users, then you will be ignored. Do it right, and you will increase your engagement. —Codie Sanchez, www.CodieSanchez.com
4. Put your company mission to work
Find a way to connect your company mission to your clients and highlight that on social media. For example, our company mission is to "Move the World." Every Monday we feature a story of a team member moving a client's world, and we call it "Move the World Monday." This is a great way to show off your company mission while connecting with clients, and the posts receive a lot of engagement —Nick Friedman, College Hunks Hauling Junk
5. Treat social as a part of your communications
Social media is often the first place that a potential new customer interacts with your brand online. Customers expect businesses to have up-to-date and informative social profiles and to be accessible. Craft a content strategy for each platform you're using: Use Facebook to create a fan community, curate a brand image on Instagram, and network in your industry on LinkedIn. —Eng Tan, Simplr
6. Respond to queries
It can be difficult to interact with all of your social media followers, especially if you have thousands, but making a concerted effort to respond to all comments, questions, and queries in a timely manner can help increase engagement and brand loyalty. As a digital marketing and PR agency, we answer every single comment or concern that our clients send via social media. —Kristin Kimberly Marquet, Creative Development Agency LLC
7. Make it interactive
Make your social media strategy more interactive by posting polls, votes, and contests, and be sure to respond to every comment you get—even if it's just a quick "thank you." This will improve brand loyalty and reach because social media followers like to actually participate with brands, and they want to know that their voice is being heard. —Andrew Schrage, Money Crashers Personal Finance
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8. Create an emotional connection
As the saying goes, "People buy emotionally and rationalize with logic." They give preference to people they know, like, and trust. One way to create an emotional connection is to share emotionally-captivating stories, images, and inspirational anecdotes related to the challenges your clients are experiencing in their lives right now. —Charles Gaudet, Predictable Profits
9. Use chatbots with great content
Doing giveaways using chatbots is a great way for customers to appreciate and receive value from your company. AppSumo does a really good job of making this happen: They work hard to create value-driven content that can be meaningful for their audience. —Nicole Munoz, Start Ranking Now
10. Be the solution to their problems
Post content that solves your audience's problems, engage directly via comments and direct messages to build a community, be interested in others, and always provide value to people. Brand loyalty is a two-way street, based on attention and consideration. If you carefully engage your community and pay attention to their comments and concerns, they will pay attention to you, your brand, and your business. —Matthew Capala, Alphametic
11. Retarget website visitors on social media
I've found the best way to retarget website visitors is to use Facebook's retargeting pixels throughout my website. What this does is show my Facebook ads to people who have visited my website but haven't converted into customers. I like to create different ads, depending on if the customer abandoned their shopping cart before they left or was simply reading a blog post. —Syed Balkhi, WPBeginner
12. Encourage user-generated content
On all of my channels I like to create content that I receive from my fan base, rather than focusing on creating all new content. My fan base has a pretty good idea of what they'd like to see, so I generally ask them to send me content that others in the community would find valuable. We are trying to build a bigger and more inclusive audience that enjoys reading our content and engaging with it. —Sweta Patel, Silicon Valley Startup Marketing
13. Show the inner workings
A great way to improve loyalty is to share the inner workings of your organization. People love to know how things work—they want to be an insider—and with increasingly low trust of large organizations, it’s a smart move to find a way to share how things are done for the benefit of your customers. —Baruch Labunski, Rank Secure
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