Photo Credit: Shutterstock
Any enterprise that wishes to thrive in the age of interconnectedness needs to maintain an active presence on social media. Popular outlets like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram provide companies with free and easy-to-use platforms to promote their brands and elicit attention from thousands of prospective customers.
In addition to helping make people aware of your brand, social media can also prove invaluable in helping you build brand loyalty. The more personally invested customers feel in your brand’s success, the more likely they are throw their support behind it.
It’s not hard to see why so many businesses have embraced social media with open arms. In addition to providing free platforms on which to promote individual brands, social media mainstays allow you to connect with your target audience on a personal level. Popular outlets like Facebook and Twitter are quickly becoming some of the business world’s hottest sales prospecting tools. So if your business is a late adopter of social media, there’s no time like the present to bring yourself up to speed. To instill brand loyalty in your social media followers, put the following pointers to good use.
Engage Your Followers
For many people, the ability to connect with their favorite brands is one of the foremost draws of social media. Being able to instantly submit comments and queries to companies is an amenity that no digital-age consumer is likely to pass up. As such, it behooves you to engage your followers and interact with them as needed. This means providing timely answers to questions and offering thoughtful replies to interesting comments made in response to your posts. After all, if you expect people to form a personal connection with your brand, you’ll need to show them that their input is valued.
As is the case with in-person interactions, you’ll need to adhere to a code of conduct when interacting with people on social media. This entails not allowing yourself to be goaded into arguments or offering glib responses to queries. In addition to making you look bad in a public forum, such behavior may draw the ire of certain social media outlets and earn your company a reprimand. A little bit of politeness and common courtesy can go a long way in keeping your followers happy and informed.
Craft Worthwhile Posts
While it’s true that every enterprise under the sun displays some level of social media activity, not all of these efforts are equally impressive. As any seasoned social media user can attest, it’s easy to tell when a company simply phones it in instead of putting genuine effort into their posts.
With this in mind, take care to put actual thought into each one of your posts, regardless of how seemingly mundane the subject matter is. For example, since many social media users respond better to images than posts that are purely text-based, make a point of including eye-catching images whenever possible. Secondly, try to avoid posts that are overly long. With the average human attention span now clocking in at eight seconds, you have precious little time to capture someone’s interest before they move on.
Organize Contests
Social media contests are effective means of building brand loyalty and promoting interconnectivity. In most cases, these contests entail submitting — and sometimes captioning — photos of a company’s products used in unique ways or in unique settings. The method by which a winner is determined varies from contest to contest, but the number of likes and shares an entry receives is often a significant factor. As an added bonus, the more shares each entry receives, the more people become aware of your brand.
Hire a Dedicated Social Media Manager
If no one in your enterprise is particularly well-versed in social media, it may be worth your while to hire a dedicated social media manager. As the title suggests, this individual will be highly knowledgeable in all matters concerning social media and be able to chart out a solid social media strategy for your brand. This person will also stay abreast of the latest social media trends and craft their posts in accordance with them. Social media managers are often employed as contractors, but as social media becomes an increasingly large part of daily life, a growing number of companies are bringing them on full-time.
In the quest to build your brand on social media, the previously discussed pointers are sure to come in handy.
