You now have a platform you built from scratch. You’ve learned to go listen to the community around you. You know how to respond, and keep conversations alive. You know how to add some depth to your social platforms, by incorporating older evidence of your success into the newer mediums. You have done all of this to start gaining new customers and retaining current customers. Now that the frameworks are assembled, you can move forward.
Disney has fired people for removing parts of a costume or uniform anywhere other than the staging area, because they understand that in their industry, every employee is constantly on stage. The same is true of your business: if you are at work, you are being observed… Every single customer interaction should be seen as a potential for both good and bad publicity. You never know when the person you are serving has 200,000 followers on Twitter.
Once you understand that every customer has the potential to publish your interactions, whether you encourage it or not, you should be actively recruiting every single customer as a member of your marketing team. If you had a sign at all of your registers, that said: Tweet “I just saved 5% at @yourcompany right now!” NOW and it will be true! Do you think you would have people in line, pulling out their smartphones? Your goal is to have customers talking about you in real time, while they are still in your establishment. This is just one example of how to accomplish this goal.
Many companies have given one time discounts for following them on Facebook. Others use Facebook to distribute weekly or monthly savings information. Fewer still list certain sales as “Facebook only”, and tell the customer to print things out. Of these three, all require no input from the individual, other than initially pushing the “Like” button. Your customer can sit back, and watch what goes on. There is no interaction in order for them to take advantage of the sale, and it is closer to traditional advertising on a social media channel, rather than being social.
One suggestion to constantly create buzz is to give away free stuff for online interaction. When a random customer responds to your comment in a positive light, give them a “We couldn’t agree more! Here, have a $5.00 gift certificate for your next visit. I’ll send it over to you in a message!” Do you think you would have more interaction on your page? It would encourage your fans to talk on your page, in the hope that their comments would solicit a gift certificate. Remember, comments feature more promenantly than likes on your fan’s friend’s Facebook pages. Give away twenty of them a month, and your fans will be scrambling over each other to comment on your site.
If you have done these five steps, you will have a powerful social media presence. This is an overview, and there is some fine tuning that you will have to do behind the scenes to fully orchestrate all of the different aspects. We welcome the opportunity to talk with you more. Please feel free to contact us.
