The present realities the world is facing now has made the virtual space an undeniable reality. The increasing prominence of social media channels has made it necessary for individuals and organizations to understand how to use and optimize various social media platforms effectively.
Given that almost every business transaction is gradually migrating online, the social media platforms that companies probably paid less attention to, can no longer be ignored. It has always been easy to find the older generation ‘accuse’ younger ones for spending so much time on social media. Ironically, young chaps who lavished precious time understanding how social media works are dictating their salaries for various roles in social media management.
For a start-up business, you may not have the luxury of hiring a dedicated person to manage your various accounts on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn and even WhatsApp, and as such, it becomes important therefore to understand how this plays out. Where your bank reserves permit you to engage a social media person, a general overview of how the whole game pans out can be effectively synchronized into your company’s set up.
Social media management explains the process of creating, scheduling, analyzing and engaging with content shared on social media platforms. If you are a regular user of social media, one or more of these activities certainly come in handy for you.
When you create content with the goal to promote your brand, products or services across various social media platforms, you are effectively functioning as a social media manager. Generally, every business thrives on the presence of new and repeated clients. Your firm cannot survive with one-time buyers, and even if it will, you need Olympian energy to attract these one-time buyers on a daily basis. Ha!
One single most important function of your role as a social media manager is to attract the right clients and make them obsessed with your products and service offerings to encourage repetitive purchase from you.
As social media has become more relevant than ever in interacting with the users of your company’s products and services, there are very helpful orientations you need to enrol in. When you master these effectively, you can effectively woo your clients online. I share three recommendations on being effective in the social media space.
Write the vision:
You should be familiar with the research that revealed that those who write down their goals have increased chances of accomplishing them as against those who don’t. The good news is their findings are not only reserved for lifetime goals. Documenting your social media approach is an increasingly important way of making the most of your account(s) relevant and accountable, first to yourself as a company and then to your followers; this is the real MVP to the current and prospective clients.
Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Instagram and other social media platforms vary in their functionality and as such it is important to have a crafted strategy to optimize each of these platforms. So just like the Harvard findings, don’t keep your social media strategy in your head, document it.
Who are you reaching?
Knowing and understanding your audience is one key function you need to be mindful of.
You need to know who you are communicating with. If your account is targeting students, the diction and tone will certainly have to differ from an account designated for corporate clients.
Proper profiling and segmentation of your audience make you get the best effect when you communicate to them. As you send messages across Facebook et al., you have a desire to elicit a particular response from the viewers of your message. The critical question is, do you know who these viewers are?
Yes, there are effective social media tools that can assist you to determine the demographics of your followers. In a subsequent material, we will explore some of these tools.
The important thing is, your business can appropriate your investment in account boosting well when you have a clear understanding of who you are reaching with which product.
Fan Milk Ghana, a manufacturer and retailer of ice cream and frozen dairy products, though serving the general public, notably on Twitter [under one of its handles “Fanyogo Ghana”, and other social and traditional media platforms] engages their followers, mostly millennials, over the period with very relatable content and have given a couple of them the opportunity to feature in their advertisements. This sells them as a relatable brand and drives marketing campaigns almost seamlessly, be it on the introduction of different products or price adjustments, among others.
Give the needed attention
Love goes where love is. When clients send a message to your inbox, have a quick reply system. One time, I noticed my company had fallen out with a client because we missed out on a message she sent to our inbox, only to be responded to later. While we can follow a service recovery process to probably regain the trust of this person, it has become important for me and my team to be more dedicated to responding to clients who engage us on our platforms.
One of the biggest challenges you can also have is asking clients to send you a direct message for details of a product. Chances are you will miss out on some messages, as such you save yourself much stress by providing all the information required on your product.
Even when you have stated the price of the product, the size of the dress and the colour of the phone case, be patient to repeat it to a client who sees the need to ask you a question you have already provided answers to in your advertorial.
When you are mentioned in a tweet or post, be sure to engage. When you are tagged in a post and you can relate, make time to comment, like or share. With that being said, you may want to steer off using a company’s social media account(s) to engage in needless banter and crass behaviour. It shortchanges the company of its goodwill over the period and casts a distasteful hue over all the hard work done thus far. That company’s brand becomes a villain, like Scar in “Lion King”; outlawed, without a “pride”, inching into gradual demise.
Oftentimes, people love people who love them. People talk with people who talk with them. Very often you find that people return the gestures of those who like and comment on their posts. When you view a person’s profile on LinkedIn, they get notified and in most instances, they visit your profile to look you out as well. Sometimes I look up the profiles of people as many times as they do mine. It’s perhaps just fun and reciprocal.
If you are in business, you will do yourself a disservice by telling a client you couldn’t respond to their messages on time because their message was part of the hundreds that you receive daily.