Are you engaged?
I’m not talking about your personal life. I am talking about you and your brand’s social media community. It’s easy to tune out your followers and simply post your content on a daily basis, but there’s a difference between broadcasting your message while hoping that your fans respond and actively engaging with your community’s discussions.
What is engagement? Engagement happens when you listen to your fans, allowing them to voice their opinions and discuss ideas with you. This shows your audience that you value their feedback and care about what they want to see from you. It’s also a great way to humanize your business and have a personality. That’s what social media is about, after all.
Why is engagement important? When you are talking with your fans, you are essentially building a relationship. You have taken down the “business walls” and are now on a personal level. Once you find your dedicated fans and engage with them, a community begins to build. Within this community are your brand ambassadors. 85% of fans of brands on Facebook recommend brands to others, according to Syncapse. These people are your word-of-mouth marketing team that will be spreading your presence to the people in their lives. You aren’t even paying them, how great is that?
After you have actively engaged with your customer-base over an extended period of time, you will start to understand what they are looking for. Use this information as free market research to help you successfully roll out new products or services. When you study buying personas and keyword usage, you can even roll out a product or service that your customers didn’t even know they wanted.
What’s more valuable than a fan of your company? An engaged fan! There’s a reason people follow and engage with companies on social media: they want to be a part of that culture. According to eMarketer, 46% of customers want to solve a problem when they engage a brand on social media, and 39% are looking to give feedback. Posting a question or survey will get you some responses but if you don’t do anything with those answers then you are wasting valuable information. Instead of sitting back and watching the responses come in, reply to them and get some valuable real-time feedback from your brand ambassadors.
Do you manage a brand’s social media presence? How are you engaging on those accounts? Do you search out for the conversation or do you let the conversation come to you? I would love to hear about some success stories you’ve had creating brand ambassadors for your clients in the comments below!
