According to the 2010 Social Media Benchmarks Report by Marketing Sherpa, 64% of businesses surveyed said they are getting targeted users to engage and participate with their social media properties.
This seems pretty obvious when you look at the statistics of Facebook which is arguably the most popular social media website. According to their stats on their website, the average user has 130 friends, is connected to 80 groups or communities, and creates 90 pieces of content each month.
With numbers like this, why would anyone want to connect with your brand or business? I’m going to give you some very simple common sense tips to get people to interact with you on social media properties.
Promote, Promote, then Promote Some More
Everything your business offers should have your social media sites listed as social media marketing is very important. I’ve seen businesses put signs on their counters saying “ join us on facebook and twitter” or something of the sort. Encourage people to join your pages. A Facebook or Twitter logo should be on every one of your ads, your product packaging, fliers, business cards or anything else that a possible customer could get their hands on. I’d put money on it that there are places you should put your social media links but aren’t right now. Fix that!
Reward Users For Interacting
Take the new “Like” button feature Facebook rolled out in mid-2010. You can reward everyone who “likes” your page with a freebie item at your store or a special 10% off your next purchase coupon.
Offering a cool gift will make people spread your Facebook page like a virus to all their friends. The cool part of this feature is that everyone who “likes” your page will have a note dropped on their friend’s facebook pages. Can you imagine how many fans you’ll get from having all your die hard customers “like” you on facebook? This is as close to a free lunch that you’ll get in advertising.
Find Marketing Partners
Where do your customers also spend money? Answer this question and you’ve got yourself a list of potential partners to cross promote with. If they aren’t direct competitors most people won’t have a problem giving you ad space since their customers will need what you offer and this gives them the goodwill of “that business recommended a cool ‘insert your business.’” In this economy, everyone is looking for an edge and if you do it right, most businesses will jump over themselves to promote your social media sites as a “cool resource” if you do the same for them. I love win-win situations and they’re easy to pull off if you just get out there and try.
Simply Ask For Feedback and Engage First
If you ask, many times you’ll receive. I’m amazed that my deli’s rankings on a famous “restaurant review” site are already higher than restaurants that have been there for over 5 years! All we did was ask for people to vote for us if they liked us! Don’t underestimate how powerful this is. I’ve found people are happy to engage with you if you engage with them first.
You need more customers. I think every business would agree with that. One of the easiest and free ways to get more customers is to engage with the ones you’ve already got. They will spread the word for you and this is the absolute best marketing in my experience. Social media is an easy way to connect with people if you just tell them you are there and interact with them first.
Image Credit: Matt Hamm
16 comments
“Promote, Promote, then Promote Some More” — i love this. also, you need to stay sincere and true. Most people can now recognize ‘fakeness’.
The mantra for being successful at socializing is to be regular and stick to a schedule. Your regularity at social media sites infuses better and richer interactivity. Schedule your day’s appointments without forgetting to include your rendezvous with social media.
Great tips Vic, Social media is a really good way to interact with others and it can add a lot of exposure to your business.
By the way I think I say this image before 😛
Great article and I like some of the tips here. I will need to work more and use social medias more effectively…
Until now I am still hesitant to use social networks for my niche. I depend so much on SEO with my traffic but with the new trends now in social networks wherein more and more people are converging into it, I think it is now time to take a look at social networks as part of my marketing strategy. Cool post here mate!
Many organization use social media platform for connect with users. It’s really good way to engage with users.
promote your blog will increase the traffic and most of the times you’ll get new readers but by promoting your log on social media sites you’ll also increasing the bounce rate of your blog.
Hey Vic, the hardest part I find in my opinion is converting those social media users to your website. I can get an interaction on a generic fan page on facebook, but the hardest part I find is getting the users away from fb or twitter and on to your page.
Till then,
Jean
Jean, indeed this is the hardest part and not only. In my opinion is even hard to convince users to make a purchase. After all this the desirable action.
A free gift will definatly do the trick! If you decide to get a business partner that would be a great move because then you will have someone else”s ideas and help. You may have to slit the profits but hey its worth it if you succeed in the end.
Your last point is certainly not the least….Even with a small userbase you can start user engagement and this way you will be building quality userbase and this will attract more users..!!
Social Media is not that hard, it’s pretty basic when you think about it.
is basic but is taking time to build a castle…
This task is very gradual process. You need time to build a good social media community! But yeah, its a social media is a must now.
I have accounts in facebook page and twitter for my business I tried a lot for both. Sometimes, I shared some images and videos of my business resources. This helps to create sustainability of the visitor of my business profile on facebook and twitter. I owned blog and I weekly update it to build interested people. Everything I tried but still I am not getting or able to attract enough people to my social media profiles.
FB’s “Like” button has been the source of many marketing campaigns….sometimes to a fault. i.e. I unfortunately don’t trust companies anymore that say I’ll receive something free by liking them on FB – I’ve been burned so many times.