The way you manage your social media, as well as the way your social media is perceived, says a lot about your brand. Because the customer experience is a huge priority for businesses, it’s important for brands both big and small to make sure they know how to properly foster relationships on social media.
And that’s where we come in. Today, we’re presenting you with an in-depth guide for fostering conversational relationships on your social media channels.
Consistency is Key
You want to foster long-term, conversational relationships, not short-term, distant and confused viewing by a disinterested audience. If engagement is what you’re shooting for, consistency is the key.
It was recently polled that around 91% of individuals believed that social media could connect communities. And if anything, this statistic proves that people online want and need a social connection when it comes to brand interaction.
In order to be effective, your brand interaction has to be consistent when it comes to your online presence. And this would play out in your social media planning by keeping your posts and messages to a specific theme or role in your marketing. For instance: When people message your social profiles or comment with questions, it’s imperative that you answer them as soon as possible, every single time. If you have specific business hours and you have potential clients that message on weekends, set up an automated message that can respond or send them to an after-hours machine or a FAQ page.
Don’t use unrelated photos, videos, and information on your company profile. By not staying consistent in your engagement efforts, you’re going to breed confusion and draw irrelevant traffic to your company’s profiles and your website.
Communicating consistency also plays a huge role in building trust with your audience. Think about it: If you know that the mail is going to be delivered at two in the afternoon five days a week, you’ll know when to expect it and can be prepared. Which communicates into a sort of security, knowing you can park your car in front of the mailbox long enough to paint the garage and won’t miss the mail.
Your Interaction Should Be Human
It turns out that around 76% of people felt more compelled to purchase from a company they felt connected to on social media than from a company that wasn’t present or engaged on social media.
See, it turns out that just being on social media and consistently posting on your profile isn’t enough. Your interaction has to be engaged and insightful. You have to give your audience a reason to want to connect with you.
Being human in the way you connect with your audience digitally can be difficult. The first step is to foster two-way conversations. This can be done through giveaways, random trivia, educational content, tips, tricks, and more.
You can encourage your audience to engage by using hashtags, downloading your custom wallpaper, or perhaps taking pictures of themselves using your product or service with a hashtag for a chance to be featured.
A few things that can help you stay connected and be more “human” in your social media interaction would be:
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Listen Before You Speak
If you really want to foster a conversational relationship, first you have to know what your audience is talking about. You can use this social listening tool from Sprout Social to help you find out so that you can listen and then provide rather than just talking into a microphone and hoping someone hears you.
What are the main things listening can help you do? Deliver and impact your audience. You want to be the one they turn to when there’s trouble. You want to be a friend. An educator. And how can you do that if you don’t know what they need?
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Tailor the Interaction
Like we mentioned before, responding quickly is a huge deal, it’s even more important to tailor your interaction to your customers. This will give a more “human” feel to your conversations and builds trust and brand recognition with your target audience. Something that can also make a huge difference is making introductions to your team members and treating social media as a conversation from the outset. Just pay special attention to your efforts and make sure you keep the conversation moving from both sides by rewarding your customers and giving them what they’re looking for and keep the conversational spark burning brightly.
It’s Always Time For Some Customer Feedback
It’s incredibly important when it comes to fostering conversational relationships to get feedback from your audience. You need to be staying up-to-date when it comes to what your audience wants to see and when.
Whether it be through a poll for one or two things in particular, or a customer-service related survey, you need to be staying up to date with how your customers are interacting with your brand, what they expect and how they feel, as well as the things they see as potential improvements.
Fostering conversational relationships is key to building a brand that will last through the constantly changing social media atmosphere. Following this guide will help put you on the right track to building a brand and an audience that will result in bigger and better conversions, more insights into your brand and your audience, and put you on a path to success.
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