What’s the first thing you do after just meeting someone for the first time? You probably ask them to be your friend on Facebook or begin to follow them on Twitter or Instagram. If you don’t do any of those things, you are a part of an increasingly small group of individuals.
Today everyone is on at least one social media site. In January of 2014, Facebook reported more than 1.2 billion users and the amount of time people spent on Facebook each month was 700 billion minutes. This makes different mediums of social media imperative when small businesses are looking for new and better ways to connect with clients.
Leverage Social Media Platforms
Image via Flickr by Rosaura Ochoa
Connecting with your customers is all about expanding your reach in unique and more personal ways. Social media allows businesses to do this through ease of accessibility. A major percentage of your business’s customers are likely using platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
Therefore, if your business has created a Facebook page, it would help communication to be more immediate and direct. Many people go to a business’s Facebook page to post complaints or to praise that business. Facebook makes it easy to share this sort of activity as well which helps to expose your business to potential customers. The same holds for Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin, and even Instagram.
Engage in Online Listening
Online listening tools make it easy for you to hear when negative or positive things are being spread about your business on the web. This tool is fairly new, seeing that only 22 percent of marketers used it in 2013, and only 24 percent plan to use it in 2014.
The online listening tool looks out for keywords specific to your business and your company’s name by using Google alerts or other websites like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck. This tool makes you more aware of the conversations going on about your business allowing you to react in a resourceful way and benefit your customers.
Elevate Your Game with Data-Based Marketing
With the social listening tools listed above, data-based marketing would not be possible. Most of you have probably noticed that sometimes things you have recently searched for will appear in the sidebar while you are on your Facebook page and sometimes it will even pop up in your news feed.
This is due to algorithms that are collecting information from the search engine and using it to better benefit the consumers. This makes it easier for customers because solutions to their most frequent wants and needs are appearing right before their eyes.
Make the Most of CRM Software
The most important part of a business is its relationship with its customers. A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform helps to manage this relationship by keeping track of marketing efforts. It lets the business know what is being more successful concerning customers and what is not. With a better idea of what emails, mail, and social posts create better results for your business, you will have a greater chance of pleasing more customers.
Develop More Personal Connections
With all of this social media, we think it makes it harder to connect on a personal level with customers when really it’s making it easier. Customers are gaining more and more access to forms of instant communication with businesses.
Customers want to feel unique and individual among the thousands of other clients. Social media allows businesses to keep in contact with customers anytime anywhere making it easy to foster a relationship and keep the customer satisfied.
So how well do these techniques work? Depending on your specific base of consumers, it can be hard to tell. With a master of science in analytics (or some similar degree), you’ll have the tools to help you figure out how well these various methods of connecting to clients are working, allowing you to adjust at any time.
Now it’s time to have your say. Have you used any of these techniques? What results did you experience?
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