5 Tips on What to Do Now:
If your company is creating a social outreach, there are steps to ensure the tangibility of your company to the customers who are reaching you on a social media basis. In terms of Facebook, the best way to keep your users engaged is to present them and involve them with content: whether it be informative or responsive is up to you and how you want to engage your social customers. When it comes to your Facebook marketing strategy, here are five tips to keep your users engaged:
1. Create valuable content.
Whenever you are updating your Facebook presence, it is important that you are maintaining engaging subject matter that is beneficial to your readers. Chances are if you are benefitting your users, you are also benefitting at the same time. Stay away from content that is unrelated or irrelevant to your business and its current events or promotions.
2. Be responsive.
If your users engage with your content by leaving comments, etc., it would be wise to acknowledge them and respond to what they have to say. Much of the time comments on Facebook provide useful feedback for promotional material and developing marketing strategies. In being responsive, though, it is important to take a professional position on any criticism that users may have to offer. From time to time, businesses encounter customers on social media who are unhappy for one reason or another. It is of utmost importance that whoever is managing your social media presence knows to be responsive in a constructive manner.
3. Develop your online personality.
You users gave your page a “like” in order to connect with you on a social basis. Including photos of your business, your staff, biographies, company or office updates makes your presence more personal than robotic or digital, it makes you “likable” online (no Facebook pun intended). When your users see that they are engaging with people, they are more likely to engage over a longer period of time, and more time means more opportunity to procure quality business relationships through social media. When creating this presence though, make sure you are still qualifying yourself as a reputable business. If you are qualified for business, your social customers will more than likely be qualified as well.
4. Acknowledge your industry.
Facebook is an incredible tool for internetwork marketing. By browsing and “liking” companies in the same industry, you are likening your online presence to those of the same companies in your market. This creates a space for your company in the network of businesses in the same market regarding Facebook searches and fan suggestions. By acknowledging your competitors within the industry, you are actually strengthening your company’s presence as a social media entity.
5. Keep your customers in mind.
Avoid stagnancy and over-updating: engaging users appropriately on Facebook is a perfect ebb and flow. You don’t want to be that company that’s constantly blasting your users and filling up their newsfeeds with material (going back to the valuable content suggestion from Tip #1), but you also want to avoid not posting enough. So what is the ultimate solution? Depending on your market, find middle ground that you see appropriate in terms of your fan base- what you’re promoting, who you’re promoting to, where you are promoting. Keeping the customer in mind is key, so timing should also be considered when updates are being made. Promote valuable material at times when you know users will be engaged: in the morning before work, lunchtime, or in the early evening after work.
Above all else, keeping the customer in mind is the ultimate goal in any type of marketing, whether it is on a social premise or not. If you adhere to the basic concepts of designing with user-friendliness as your endgame, you will ultimately create success in all of your marketing strategies, especially a social one.