Social Media Management Guidelines: Best Practices from some of the world’s leading organizations
Discover top guidelines for effective social media management from leading organizations. Minimize risks while maximizing brand representation.
Social Media Marketing
The Social Media Customer Service Revolution
Don’t let the name fool you—social media is about much more than sharing vacation pictures and catching up with old friends. Twitter, Facebook, and social media platforms throughout the Internet are being utilized as broad communication tools, by individuals as well as organizations. So what exactly does this mean for your customer service campaign? Social customer services take support matters out of the shadows and into the public eye. In addition to free exposure, it provides another avenue by which customers can build their relationship with your brand. It shows current and prospective clients that you care about your customers and can also help to clear up common problems or confusion proactively through public responses. Employ these tips to make sure you’re getting the most out of your social campaign. Keep in Touch Social networking rule number one: stay connected. Make sure to monitor your social customer service accounts regularly in order to respond quickly to inquiries. Prioritizing your responses through these channels makes your business appear bigger, more organized, and makes it clear that you value customer satisfaction. Turn Negatives Into Positives Social media users are known for making their feelings known, often with blunt honesty. When you receive strongly-worded complaints, don’t give in to the temptation to erase them. Responding effectively and winning over that type of customer is an excellent way to instill confidence in the public, while also avoiding the tricky minefield which occurs when a user cries censorship. Organize Your Communications Just as you likely have separate e-mail addresses or phone numbers for general inquiries and customer service, you should consider opening separate social media accounts: one for general business needs and one exclusively for social customer services. This is especially true for larger companies which elicit large volumes of communications. Make sure that both accounts are actively maintained by qualified people in your organization. Learn the Tools of the Trade Social networks are constantly evolving, shifting to meet the needs of its constantly-expanding user base. It’s vital that you and/or your social media representatives keep tabs on changes and updates, maintaining a clear understanding of various platforms and how best to exploit them. Facebook in particular is known for making sweeping changes, often without much advance warning, so always ensure that your organization is up to speed. Good Will: The Great Equalizer You’ve probably heard the phrase “kill them with kindness,” advice routinely given when someone is confronted with a difficult person who they must cooperate with nonetheless. Complaints can be tough to deal with at times, whether due to the volume, the tone, or a combination of both. Your goal is to take it all in stride, just as you would in person or over the phone. Communicating over the Internet is like driving a car: people are much more inclined to shout things they’d never say in a civilized conversation. Don’t sink to that level—keep your attitude upbeat, positive, and unflappably polite. When the public observes a hot-headed customer that is treated with kindness and grace, you win and so does your brand. In Summary Social media services can open all new lines of communication for your business, helping you reach expanded customer segments and allowing you to promote your brand with an investment of just a little time and energy. Effective utilization is one of the most powerful and affordable tools at your disposal; an inability to adapt, however, might just leave your business in the dark. Here more about it at the iARE Annual Conference : Etechgs Events This blog was first post on LinkedIN
Five Reasons to Integrate Social Media Into Your Larger Marketing Strategy
In the old days, marketing was all about one-way communication with consumers via advertisements, newsletters, and hard calls to action. Now, with the advent of social platforms and live chat services, consumers expect to be able to communicate with brands in a much more transparent and immediate way. If the social strategy isn’t part of your marketing efforts, you could be missing out on much more than likes and shares. Here are five reasons to make social media a marketing priority. 1. Build Strong Relationships Marketing through social platforms is all about the relationship you have with clients. This is no place for the hard sell; it’s where you position your brand for open and honest two-way communication. There is a growing emphasis on transparency in business today, and that means that more and more brands are getting away from one-way advertising messages and focusing instead on relationship-building and making connections with consumers. Social media opens up limitless opportunities to engage visitors, and if you’re not online you’re surely missing out. In fact, some brands report increasing revenue by upwards of $1 million as a result of marketing on social. 2. Make Your Brand Accessible In the same vein as transparency comes accessibility. Once upon a time, it was sufficient to list your contact information on your business website and return calls and emails on your schedule. Now, it’s all about providing excellent customer service on your client’s schedule. People expect to be able to connect with you at any time and can access social media to do so. Having a strong presence online makes you accessible and welcoming to visitors, no matter what time it is. 3. Engage Your Target Audience If there were one single reason to integrate social into your marketing strategy, it would be an invaluable opportunity to pinpoint and connect with your target audience. Besides the relationship-building aspect, most social platforms also have their own analytics functions. This means you can quantitatively measure the number of likes, shares, and visits to specific content. Why does it matter? It matters because you can learn what types of content your target audience loves, which will help you craft an extremely insightful marketing campaign. 4. Leverage Social Media Advertising While the main point of bringing social media into your marketing strategy is to open up two-way communication and make connections with clients, these platforms also create new opportunities for advertising. Many social sites offer their own paid advertising space. It’s a great place to insert your brand and gain wide visibility among your target audience. If you have the budget for them, using these advertising services can give you measurable insight to the impact of your ads. 5. Create Shareable Content Finally, one of the best reasons to use social platforms like YouTube is to develop shareable content. Research shows that video content is some of the most viral on the web, and you can maximize your marketing efforts by creating a YoutTube channel for your business. The great aspect about creating video content on YouTube is that you can use the same videos across all of your social media accounts, including Facebook, Twitter, and your business website. These are just five reasons to make your social strategy a marketing must. This blog was published on LinkedIN by Jim Iyoob
Tips to Boost your Social Media Engagement
Building a social media presence for your company or brand is increasingly an essential part of doing business in the modern corporate world. Chances are good that you have already taken the plunge and started building your brand in the social channel of your choice. However, you may not be getting the results you had anticipated. If customer and employee engagement is down on your social media accounts, the problem may not be with your customers or clients. There are several steps you can take to boost social media engagement, most of which can be done with relatively minor adjustments to your regular posting routine. Include Pictures and Other Media Pictures, video and other visual media are an essential part of the social media experience on virtually every platform. Not only can you convey more with a a picture than with a long text post that people are less like to read, you can also use images as a clever way to get around character limits on platforms like Twitter. Just remember that including too much information in an image can cause access issues for customers who use screen readers. Blog at the Right Times Make social media posts when your customers are most likely to read them and don’t hesitate to repost content a couple of times to reach a larger audience. The ideal time to post varies between industries and customer demographics, so analyze the data you have before working out a posting schedule. A social media consultant can help you make sense of a large amount of data. Let Your Personality Shine Through Social media posts aren’t meant to be stiff and formal like press releases. Use humor and personality to engage your readers and make them feel like they are interacting with a real human being rather than a corporate-branded robot. Make your followers laugh, think, or even just smile and they will be much more likely to keep coming back. Engage with Your Audience If you want your audience to engage with your posts, consider just asking them. While asking for followers to like or share content may seem a little desperate, it works more often than you might think. However, make sure to take control of your intellectual property. If you create an image to share, watermark it or sign it with your company name so that it doesn’t become lost once it has been released into the social media wilds. Respond to Comments and Blogs Always make your customers and followers feel valued. Respond to posts on your social media pages, even if it’s just to say a quick thanks. Longer comments or questions may require longer responses, so make sure to carve out a little time each day for responding to posts. While you may get a little tired of typing out the same response multiple times, remember that each response is unique to the person who receives it.
Mobile Text Messaging: Your Marketing Strategy Needs It
Your marketing strategy in the 21st century is very different from the one that worked in earlier centuries. Today, you have many options for communicating with your customers, consumer choices, diverse media and support opportunities. Your challenge then becomes finding the best way of reaching your target audience and capturing their attention. Your target consumer receives messages right, left and center and you need to consider any opportunity to reach them easily. Text messaging marketing is one medium that you can use to communicate with your customers. Consider the following ideas that text messaging offers to you and your customers and the reason you should integrate it into your marketing strategy:- It is permissive marketing The beauty of text messaging marketing is that it is permission-based. The customer willingly listens to what you are saying. Not to minimize the effectiveness of a billboard, but for comparison purposes only, a billboard is there for everyone to see while a text message arrives at the customers’ handset, and they opt to read it or not. As long as you are not sending a text message every 2 minutes, your customers will always read the updates or whatever messages your send. It is personal A mobile phone is a personal gadget. When someone receives a text message, he or she stops what he or she was doing to read it. It enables you to communicate with your customers individually. You can even personalize the message further by mentioning their name in the text message. The customer will be happy to realize that you know them by name, and this will help them make a purchase decision faster. It is Interactive This century is all about relationships and conversations with your customers. A text message opens up a door for you to interact with your customers without intruding. It has an option of the customer responding immediately or even sharing it with others. As one customer shares a text, they help you interact with their friends. The introduction of Multimedia messaging service (MMS) has made interactions with the customers more exciting. It enhances your relationship. It is immediate Statistics shows that everybody reads a text message within the first 4 minutes of receiving it. When you have urgent information to pass across, a text message is your best bet. For example, if you run a retail store, and you have a special offer on a particular item, you can spread the word fast to thousands of customer by a click. You will receive an immediate response, especially from your target customers. Moreover, I believe that your message was targeted, and thus the turnout will be high. You can track it If you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it. You can track who responded to your messages and who did not. For example, if you sent a message about a “sale” taking place at your store, you can tell how many people came in. It also helps you handle one of the biggest problems in marketing, measuring the return on investments. In conclusion, the facts that a text message is permissive marketing method, it is personal, interactive, immediate and trackable makes it a necessity in your marketing strategy. Remember that a majority of consumers now owns a mobile device and you should not waste that marketing opportunity.
