Engaging customers through social media appropriately, helps influence their decisions in your favor and encourage buying. There are several opportunities that are presented to a seller and at each stage taking the right action could help in converting and creating a loyal group of customers.
Customers typically initiate their buying by searching online for the product and your product most likely shows up in the search results as one amongst many choices. At this stage branding has a significant impact.Your significant presence in various social media channels helps users choose you over the others.
Social Branding becomes an important piece of the puzzle. How is Social Branding different from Traditional Branding? As stated in this blog post
Social branding embraces listening, participation and engagement in online brand communities.
If traditional branding pushes opinions and information to customers, social branding, in contrast, is about encouraging information flows in every direction: between employees and customers, customers and customers, employees and employees, and influencers and everyone. Social branding goes well beyond receiving market information to engaging, networking and community building, one customer at a time.
Typical exposure customers get in various social media channels could be
- Tweets about great customer service offered by your company
- Recent experiences in your company's Facebook page
- Humorous videos about the product in YouTube spread virally
- Reviews in Yelp or
- Blog posts by influencers
Brand recall will obviously be better with increased presence in social media.
All other things being equal
- Good reviews and recommendations about your product
- Positive experiences of other customers with your product and company in social media
- Chatter about your great customer support
- Engaging blog posts from influencers
all help in customer making a decision in your favor.
It is important that to improve your social media presence encourage your customers to provide reviews about the product their experiences with it and the company and at each point in the sales cycle. Engage your customers in various channels after the purchase is complete by getting them
- To follow you on Twitter
- "Like" you in Facebook
- Provide reviews in Yelp
Make their experiences of doing so meaningful by providing assistance about your product they are using now, special deals for upgrades, useful tips in Facebook page. You have to give reasons for customers to engage with your brand even after a purchase is complete. This will ensure that you now have a loyal customer and not just an impulsive one-off buyer.
How effectively does your company use Social Media in its sales cycle? Would like to hear your comments.