5 Tips for Cultivating Customers with Social Media

Last year Starbucks used the power of social media to drive more than one million people to their stores in one day.¹ Their free pastry day social promotion is a testament to Twitter and Facebook and the power social media has for boosting brand recognition and driving customers to sites and stores. Used correctly for your company, social media can bring in new customers and strengthen relationships with current customers.

1. Share Regularly

You need to share regularly on your social media sites, just as you would with good friends. “If you do not share content regularly enough, you will not be considered a reliable source for your key topic.”²  If you don’t have the resources to provide fresh new posts and comments on a pretty regular basis, you may want to wait on using that social channel.

2. Listen Effectively

Effective listening is not just about paying attention to who and how many people you’re following and who are following you, or the keywords you’re tracking, it’s also about the meaning of the conversations. This means someone needs to be actually reading and responding to at least a portion of the social media mentions.

3. Give Reasons for Customers to Follow You

Give customers compelling reasons to follow you. Contests, sweepstakes, and social media coupons are good ways to help build your social media subscriber base.³

4. Appeal to Your Visual Customers with YouTube

Many companies have joined in on Twitter and Facebook conversations. But a great way to boost your online presence and appeal to the more visual customers is with a YouTube video. According to Forrester Research, “any given video in the index stands about a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page in the index.”⁴ Embed the video onto your site, make sure you put relevant keywords in the video title and tags and promote the video on your other social sites.

5. Don’t Know Where to Go? Ask

If you’re not sure where to begin in the social media arena, then ask your customers which channels they like. It’s more important to go where they are, than to start blank, take a stance, and say, “hey, over here.”

Marketing used to be about getting a big megaphone and shouting about your company attributes and specials. Those days are, for the most part, gone, because what matters a lot more than what you say about your company, is what others say about you. So, you need to take the time to have conversations; conversations that engage current customers, and conversations that give potential customers to choose your company over another.

Resources

1. Starbucks Used Social Media to Get One Million to Stores in One Day
2. Content Curation: Engage Your Customers in Three Simple Steps
3. Four Ways Email Can Strengthen Relationships in Other Channels (and Why You Should Care)
4. Eight Tips for Optimizing YouTube Videos