Your Secret Business Tool — Social Media
Over time, some social media platforms can lose their initial popularity or significance. However, 'socialness' never changes. Regardless of the platform, each one gives businesses unequaled access and insight into their customers. When this information is used thoughtfully, businesses become privy to their customer's innermost thoughts, questions, interests, concerns, and dilemmas. In this post, we will look at how and why social media is the secret tool for operating a successful business.
Start With Building Trust
Without question, trustworthy companies are created from enduring relations. Customers initiate their transactions with 'company reps', irrespective of the company's status. So, to grow these business relationships, trust must be involved. But how do you start building trust? Here's how:
You Need To Be Present
The key is being available to the community members. For example, answer and follow up with all the direct messages and comments from users. Give value to those who read and interact with your posts. View them as people who may promote your business. Not as data or credit cards. They are people.
Display Your Humanity
Showing your face in a video or an occasional selfie can really resonate with customers. Seeing you online for a long time can make them feel like they know you because they've seen how you interact with people and what you post. Showing some humanity is valuable because your followers are interested in knowing you, not just what's being marketed. Examples are posting photos of fun company staff outings or perhaps retweets from admired companies/individuals.
Additionally, don't forget the power of humility. Trust can be built by admitting your mistakes. Sharing content describing what you've learned along the way is a great place to start, along with adding a bit of humor.
Be Transparent
Trust gets built from being helpful and being honest. Just as you can see that with friends, it's also true on social media. Honesty should be applied to your customer's questions and queries. Transparency shows that you do care about them. Responding quickly and even quirkily to every customer query, whether or not they're worthy of being answered in the first place, can generate higher engagement and often praise from the social media community.
Along with being honest and transparent, having a consistent tone is vital to building trust across social media. If the best manner of voice for your business is friendly and conversational, reflect that in all the captions, answers, and messages you post and send to your users.
Even though it can take a lot of time to build up trust, it takes very little time to break it. Trust can be destroyed in an instant if people' sense' you are misleading, deceptive, or you promote some specific cause and do nothing to support it.
Learning to Listen
So far, we've outlined the importance of building trust by being present, human, and transparent. Now we'll focus on understanding the power of listening. Most people listen with the intent to reply rather than the goal to understand. Especially with social media. No matter if it's what people say about your product or service, what your competitors are doing, or what the buzz is in your industry, the key to success is listening with the goal of complete understanding. When you know what's going on in your respective industry, you're more apt to find your way to participate in that conversation.
Creating Valuable Content
The term "valuable content" for digital users has different meanings for different people. A useful identification filter to use is "help, don't hype."
Listen to the questions being asked in your industry and answer them with your product or service. Inherent value is created when problems such as "How is this done?", "Where can I find that?" or "How does this work?" are resolved rather than just selling your products. Users get the distinct impression that you know what you're doing, and they can really trust your products or services, even if a specific product isn't mentioned anywhere in the blog post.
Here are some ways to begin creating content that's of value to your users, no matter what your area of business:
Make Your Content Customer-Focused
Many companies nowadays post information about their business. The content becomes more valuable to a customer when it's personalized for them, answers a problem they might have, or inspires them. Customer-focused content is what helps your customers make informed decisions and keeps them returning to you.
Request Real Feedback
The famous phrase, "There's no such thing as a stupid question." is especially true when it involves your audience. Encourage them to ask questions and provide their feedback. You cannot define what is valuable. Only your audience can. So ask. Every question that your ideal client asks is an opportunity to create valuable content that answers that question. To determine what content appears to deliver the largest impact on your audience, review your website analytics. You can also check your website analytics to find out which content seems to have the most audience impact and concentrate on producing additional content in the same arena.
Produce Content That Reflects Your Business
Valuable content helps people to understand your product or service and stimulates positive engagement amongst the users. However, this doesn't mean re-strategizing content purely for higher engagement levels. For success on social media, your content needs to be useful and informative, or people will look elsewhere.
Which Platform Works Best for Relationship Building?
Your best social media platform to use is the one where the people you want (your potential customers) are the most active. It might be Twitter, Instagram, or one of several others.
You will need to review your business and resources. Here are some of the top social media platforms:
- Facebook. Here you are able to interact with possible customers, competitors, professionals in my space, find new friends, and increase value. It has the most members worldwide based on population percentage. You can interact with other members, build connections, and trusted relationships. Additionally, you can benefit from Facebook ads along with 'audience tracking'. You have a dynamic retention tool in Facebook groups, where you can have one-on-one exchanges regularly with platform members.
- Instagram. Because of its pictorial nature, Instagram is inherently very appealing. With its feed and content, members are able to have interactions in various ways from the same location.
- Twitter and LinkedIn. The Twitter and LinkedIn platforms are a dynamic pair for social marketing. They help you to engage prospects, find alternatives, and maintain connections until people are ready to buy or would refer you to someone else.
- Markethive. Markethive delivers an Inbound Marketing platform equal or superior to Marketo and Hubspot. It includes email autoresponders, blogging platforms, landing pages, social media broadcasting, Tracking analytics, SEO, backlinking automation, messaging, e-commerce, and SEO. The benefits of these systems are to "attract," "convert," "close," and "delight." Building a large loyal long term customer base.
Improvement Of Your Social Media Presence
Social media is never a 'One and Done' relationship. It is always ongoing and evolving. What's critical is knowing it's not only concerning increasing your number of customers but also about extending your capacity and impacting your business sector. With the intention of advancement, review these useful guides:
- Compose a conversation. Keep in mind you should be talking, not broadcasting. Since Social media utilizes conversational platforms, you should concentrate on creating conversations. That includes listening, questioning, and speaking with people, not at people. These days audiences are sick and tired of being talked at by individuals that just broadcast. They want to connect, and you can make the connection by involving yourself in their conversations.
- Update & Optimize your social media Bio's. This is the initial image that potential connections will have of you. Unless your profile stands out from all the others on social media, your results will be less than you would like. Identify your points of difference and share them.
- Try A/B testing. First, brainstorm for interesting, fresh topics that would reflect your business's image. Next, run the projects through a test in terms of their subject matter, post times, and headings by managing the results. If the results are favorable, proceed to the next test. For example, on Facebook, post a rough draft on a certain topic and see the response, i.e., questions asked, comments, and likes. From there, you can determine whether to leverage the quick post into longer-form content, such as a blog post or email.
Looking Ahead
Always remember, it's not about the technology; it's about the people. Social media platforms, without a doubt, can bring us together on both a personal and professional level with others. Perhaps the best way to move ahead, no matter how big or small your business, is using social media as a tool for understanding people. When your business prioritizes this understanding using open and honest engagement, trust can be slowly built, and success can indeed be had.
