Creating Rules for Engaging Customers Online
What will you do if you find detractor statements about your brand once you start generating a presence at social media sites online? You will need to have proper protocols built before you can respond in a positive manner. There are a variety of ways to make lemonade out of lemons posted by people online. There are a variety of protocols that must be established before you get started and I want to provide you with some questions that will help you determine the best ways to create your plan of action:
- Who from your company will engage brand or non-brand advocates who write about your company?
- Will your team be representing your brand as a single voice or multiple accounts and persona’s?
- How much time will be allocated to this team to conduct social media marketing activities?
- How will your company test for success metrics at the variety of sites you are engaging?
- What are some best practices to implement if there are negative posts made about your company?
- Do you keep these conversations on or offline?
- Etc.
Engage Your Customers Strategically
The best thing you can do from the get go is to start listening to what consumers are saying about you at you preferred social media sites. This way, you can get a baseline for what the general tone is surrounding your products and services offered. Here are a few things you should be listening to:
- What are they’re saying about your products or services?
- What do they mean when mention your brand?
- What’s bothering them about your brand?
- What makes them happy about your brand?
Now that you are armed with these details you can respond to these individuals in a neutral manner to help them with their queries or solve existing customer services issues utilizing your newly created social media protocols. Keep in mind that your job is to listen to what’s being said, to help spread your message to the appropriate people, at the right time. For example, for every five to fifteen messages where you provide assistance to community members you can include promotional information to them that adds value to your existing relationship.
Depending on the platform you are marketing to will dictate how you reach consumers and in which fashion. For instance, if you use Twitter you can utilize sites like Twellow for finding new connections, to TweetReach to seeing how far your Tweets will travel online. If you are utilizing Linkedin or Facebook you can always sign up for groups related to your niche, or answer questions posed by community members to showcase your expertise. You can also find niche blogs to post comments to or Tweet to other users who have similar interests to your brand, leave wall comments, make forums posts, etc. As you can see there are a ton of sites you can use to reach new customers regarding your marketing objectives. The key thing to remember is that you must always present community members with resources that provide answers to their questions or meet their needs in other ways. If you do this, you will ensure your brand makes a greater impact with community members of your targeted social media communities.
ENGINE-IUS Marketing, Inc. is a Social Media Marketing & Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consulting firm located in Colorado Springs, Colorado. 
