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7 Ways To Engage With Your Followers on Twitter

 

 

 

 

Twitter is a great social media tool for sharing information and building a community of loyal customers. It is ideal for keeping customers informed about your brand and can also be used very efficiently to drive traffic to your other social platforms. The most effective use for Twitter is certainly its ability to help build lasting relationships with people who share your same interests.

Here are some tips that will help you to boost your level of engagement with your target audience on Twitter.

1. Leave space, yet Tweet consistently

If you send out 10 tweets in one hour about your brand, your followers will be overwhelmed and annoyed. Your Tweets will end up looking like spam. However, it is important to Tweet consistently throughout the day so that your followers will come across valuable content that they will want to share. Leave at least 30 minutes in-between your Tweets to keep a good balance between informing and over-informing.

2. Connect people

On social media sites, people want to make connections with those who share their interests. When you help to connect your followers with similar people, your followers will be grateful and have more respect for you. In return, they will be more likely to engage with your brand.

3. Show your personality on your profile

Having a real picture of yourself or your company will make people trust your brand more. You will appear more human and more relatable. Add personal information into your bio to get people interested in what your brand is all about. This way, people will feel passionate and make connections with your brand and look out for your Tweets, and hopefully, will retweet more.

4. Ask questions, and give answers

By asking questions to your followers, they automatically become engaged with you. It gives them a moment to think about what you’ve asked and might spark an interest in them to give you a quality response that you can learn from. When they ask questions back, be sure to answer those questions to build a conversation with your followers.

5. Break the news first

Think about some issues that are relevant to your brand and your company’s interests and provide valuable content continually about those issues. This positions you as an expert in your field, and your followers will know they can count on you to keep them updated about certain topics. Try to be the first to spread news on issues to increase the number of retweets you get, and get the conversation started in your community of followers.

6. Promote your followers

A great way to engage with your followers is to retweet your most passionate followers’ Tweets. Take time to thank them for sharing content and #Recommend and #FF others.

7. Ask for a retweet

If you add, “please RT” to your Tweets, you’ll find that you will get an increased number of retweets. It’s a simple way to remind your followers about retweeting and shows that you want to spread your information and reach out to others.

Twitter is not a site you can use to gain customer loyalty through without engaging with your followers. Always stay active on your Twitter account and listen to your customers to build a strong, lasting, engaging relationship with them

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Gain Brand Loyalty with Email Marketing!

 

 

When you combine the benefits of email along with social platforms, you can promote any product, increase sales and build brand loyalty in more ways than ever.

Big brands like Starbucks, and daily deal brands like Groupon have found success from combining rewards and discounts with their social media strategies. But what about businesses that aren’t so well known, or don’t promise amazing daily discounts?

You don’t need to be a top name retail brand or have thousands of Twitter followers to get the most benefit out of your social media strategy this year thanks to combining email and social marketing.

By combining social media efforts with a well-targeted email marketing strategy, companies can easily gain customer loyalty. To do so, you must use the perfect incentive and target the perfect audience, at the perfect time. Use these three ideas to increase your word-or-mouth marketing and boost customer engagement by using both social and email strategies:

1. Offer an appropriate incentive

Discounts are great, but there are other ways to push your email subscribers to get social with your brand. Some techniques marketers use to increase engagement include altruism (the idea of people passing on information they find valuable) or use unique social games like engaging videos or fun quizzes. Whatever technique you choose, make sure that the content and tone of your incentive align with the interests of your target audience.

2. Look for the social butterflies

Doing some research to customize your social engagement strategies will end up being more successful than simply asking your email subscribers to “like” or follow your brand. Find the consumer “influencers”-those who are active social media participants. Market to these people so they can help influence potential clients and bring more customers to your brand. You must find how engaged certain email subscribers are to your brand and pick out the most active social members, most loyal to your brand. To do this, use social data, social monitoring and listening platforms to examine existing email files with information about subscribers’ social interactions. With this information, you can come up with email-marketing segments based off subscribers’ social profiles. If you discover you have an active group of subscribers, think about creating a referral marketing campaign to push those subscribers to recruit new potential customers.

3. Learn your consumers’ passions

The key element of social media is about people being brought together who share a common interest. If you try to force your brand on an audience not interested in what you have to offer, no marketing strategy is going to work. You must find out what your target audience likes and interact with them based on those likes.

You might find your audience has a common interest in your product or service, but you must dig deeper to find the best way to get them excited about your product or service. You can’t expect your customers to buzz about your brand just because they’re interested in what you have to offer. Come up with ways to market to your audience that involves their passions. If your company sells car parts, think about igniting your consumers’ passion for cars and racing. Don’t just make your marketing about car parts; be creative and think of ways that can get people who share the common interest in cars to be active with your brand.

A thorough marketing strategy that utilizes the benefits of email and social tools can provide new and exciting ways for companies to build brand loyalty and boost sales. No matter what your company has to offer, it all comes down to how you connect with your consumers!

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Choosing the Right Social Media Tools for Your Business

2012 has been called the, “Year of Social Media.” Reports have found that 75% of marketers plan to increase their social media spending this year, and social media is expected to have a major impact on television and the presidential election.

With such high expectations for social media, you may feel like if your business is not in the social media loop, you could quickly go out of business. However, before rushing into multiple social media platforms in a panic, consider your business needs. Social media can certainly help your business, but some platforms aren’t the best options for your company, so don’t feel like you must enable all platforms.

Today, a wide variety of social media platforms exist that have various features to cater to specific needs. Come up with an effective social media strategy that will use your money and resources the most efficiently. Don’t believe the hype that getting thousands of Facebook followers, or sending out dozens of Tweets per day is the key to social media success for every business. To get the most out of social media marketing, you need to figure out which social media tools are right for you, and focus specifically on those.

First, identify your audience. You need to define whom it is you want to talk to. If you try to communicate with the most number of consumers possible, you won’t see much brand loyalty in return. If you want to engage with as many consumers as possible efficiently, you need to use different tools in different ways. Every social media platform has its own culture. They have specific tones and engage a specific type of person. This is why it is crucial for you to pick the platforms that best reach your target audience.

Next, define your social media needs. Are you simply trying to increase foot traffic to your stores? Or are you trying to see large sales increases? Maybe your issue is not so much about your customers as it is about your company’s communication techniques. All social media platforms don’t fit all business needs. Figure out what your goal is with social media for you company, and choose the platforms that best fit those needs.

Thirdly, make a plan for how you will use social media. The main goal of all social media platforms is to connect to others, but different platforms do this in different ways. Are you trying to get feedback from your customers? Are you trying to improve your recruiting efforts? Figuring out how you want to use your social media accounts will help narrow down the available platforms to the ones that are most relevant to your needs.

And finally, choose the right tool! After you’ve found your target audience, defined your needs, and decided how you want to use social media, you’re all set to choose the right platforms.

Now do the research necessary to find the right platform for you. If you want your social media strategy to be more private than a public network like Twitter, look into a site like Yammer. Yammer allows you to securely communicate private information.

If your business is trying to build a stronger relationship between its staff and outside contractors, use a platform that can be easily integrated into your business. Think about creating a Wiki or checking out a site like Huddle.

If you’re a local company, wanting to connect with those close to you, platforms like Gowalla or Foursquare give users rewards for check-ins and other discounts that will lead to more foot traffic to your store in a way that a larger platform like Facebook cannot do as successfully.

Clearly social media strategies are complicated and there’s no single, right answer for finding success. Investigate the available platforms and experiment. Find what’s working and what’s not. If you find that a certain platform is not generating results, don’t waste your time with it. Move on a focus on other platforms that are better suited for your business.

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The Benefits of Blogging


 

Blogging has certainly become a huge part of social media marketing today. By providing quality information, a consumer can understand exactly how your company works and exactly what kind of products and services you provide. A powerful blog can provide an eye-opening insight for a consumer to realize how your business is relevant to their life.

Blogging is similar to a company newsletter. If your business still hasn’t launched a blog, you probably have a company newsletter lying around the office. These newsletters provide information, possibly show pictures, and are a way for employees and consumers to check out the latest updates happening in the company. Perhaps they even offer articles with tips for employees, or maybe a list of employee birthdays.

The point is, newsletters like this keep the company unified and up to speed. However, the problem with printed newsletters is that they have a limited life span and come with publication costs, which limits circulation. This means the information is provided then quickly lost, and only a small number of people end up seeing it.

With this in mind, consider the power of blogging! Everyone in your company can access it, and consumers and future customers everywhere can view it as well. With all the free sites available to start a blog, cost is not an issue. Even creating a section on your website dedicated to blogging is a free way to post information that will remain available for anyone interested.

Additionally, information on blogs can be added, edited and updated as needed. And with powerful search engine technology, users anywhere interested in your company’s line of expertise can be directed to your company’s blog. This will lead to a greater awareness of your brand, and a greater increase in potential customers.

So, if your business is set on printed newsletters, take these thoughts into consideration and see for yourself the benefits of online blogging. Think about any amazing articles published in magazines and newsletters that you’d be dying to read again. If those articles had been blogs online, you would be able to refer back to them anytime.

Keep in mind that with all the power that comes from blogging comes more responsibility. Your readers and followers will have questions, want further information, and the Internet makes it easy for them to give quick feedback to your blogs. So be prepared to be active and address your readers and learn from their feedback to strengthen your blog.

It’s time to grasp the importance of blogging, and reap in the benefits! Through quality blog posts, you will keep readers coming back to your blog and potentially gain consumers through interesting and informed blogs about your company.

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Tips for Using Twitter for Small Businesses

 

Twitter has undeniably become an effective tool for carrying out social media marketing campaigns. For small to medium sized businesses specifically, Twitter can be one of the most efficient platforms for gaining brand awareness and loyalty.

Just like with any other social media tool, it’s crucial to first set a campaign plan before jumping onto the site. You must first establish how your company will get the most benefit out of using Twitter.

To help get the most out of Twitter, here are some tips for your business to follow to find success.

1. Decide what you’re going to tweet before tweeting it

You want your brand to have a distinct and uniform communication style. Keep your way of speaking to consumers consistent to give your brand it’s own unique voice. Everything you tweet should relate to a common message that reflects your brand.

By creating your tweets ahead of time, you can check to make sure they give off a common vibe and provide quality content that connects to your product or service.

2. Follow your customers back

One of the benefits of being a small-sized business is that you are able to have close relationships with your consumers. On a site like Twitter, people enjoy being followed back. It shows your interest in them and helps create and build a relationship.

When you gain a follower, follow them back as a way to return the favor. They followed you out of interest for your brand, so follow them back and show them you’re interested in them as well.

3. Search for possible followers

On Twitter, people usually follow a brand not only because they’re interested in that brand, but also because that brand provides quality content. If your brand can come up with continually quality content, you will gain more followers who have an interest in your brand’s area of expertise.

You can find more potential followers by making searches simply by using the subject matter from your content and searching for others who are discussing the same topic. Follow these people and see if they end up following you back. But, be careful that these people are truly interested in what your brand is all about, as you don’t want to end up gaining a bunch of followers who are not interested in what your product or service has to offer.

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Selling Your Products and Services With Social Media

 

 

In 2012, more companies will come to realize that doing business through social networks is a huge payoff. People are becoming more aware of how social media works and are getting comfortable with it.

With this level of comfort with social media finally reached, it is now the goal of marketers to experiment with ways on how to go above and beyond with social media! While using social media correctly takes lots of patience, finding the latest tricks to make your social media efforts unique is the key to becoming (and maintaining) a thriving business.

The main cause companies do not find success with social media marketing is when there are merely sending out sales messages through social networks. Communicating sales messages might work to an extent on an advertising and email marketing level, but they fall short when considering that most people do not join social networks to shop. With this in mind, sales pitches can come across as annoying or harsh to social network users.

If you want to find your optimal path to selling your products and services with social media, here are some tips.

1. Communicate to the right target market.

While there may be millions of people on Facebook, you do not need to target all of them. To find your perfect market, you need to communicate that, “We sell this” or “We help with that, and for anyone who wants this or that, we are talking to you!” It’s also important to use data to create your social media messages that will precisely spark interest to those looking for your product or service.

2. Use only the best messages.

With social media sites like Twitter, companies try to use 140 characters or less to advertise in attempt to get their audience to “retweet” and interact with their brand. But, this isn’t a technique that is easily mastered. Try using Google AdWords to experiment with compact messages. When you come across a message that gains clicks, you know that message is likely to have similar success as a tweet or other social network message!

3. Engage with your audience.

This is one of the most powerful Internet marketing tools. You want to gain information from your audience, on top of giving out your business information. You want your audience to share their thoughts and rate things in order for your business to get feedback and cater to your audiences needs/wants, likes and dislikes. Make feedback forms part of your way of doing business in return for providing great products and services. Make your content easy to like, tweet and email, so it becomes social.

4. Prove you’re a worthwhile company.

Even if you can compose the most convincing tweet, it’s still hard to get someone to buy into your company based off that one tweet. Make your relationship with your consumers about value and interaction right from the start. Think about giving something away that your target market needs and wants. Then become the company whose free products and services are better than other companies’ paid stuff! People will certainly want to engage with your company this way, and hopefully become loyal customers to your brand.

5. Listen to your audience.

After your company has authentically and carefully done all this work to get on the right track to social media success, let your target market know where your company is headed and keep them on board with you. Imagine how your current customers view your company and try to get them to see where your company could take them in the future. Don’t automatically think that your customers will see the full potential of your company! Help them by showing them how to get the most out of your business. If you do this, and still don’t see sales, you will at least have gained the right to ask your consumers what it is you’re not doing well, and they will guide you on how to serve them better.

Many Internet marketers use these tips in their social media efforts, but when all of them are used together, in a cohesive effort, your company will find the pay off in social media marketing. Always remember that it takes hard work and patience!

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Optimize Social Media ROI-Return on Influence!

 

 

Return on investment with social media can polarize several public relations, marketing and advertising efforts since there are a growing number of agencies and businesses utilizing social media marketing and analysis efforts to see return on investment. While some companies get ROI through social media use on Facebook or YouTube, marketers need to realize that in order to optimize their social media efforts, true ROI is about influence from consumers!

ROI needs to involve connections companies make with their customers. Companies’ social media marketing should act as recommendations and inspirations to buy certain products and services. The goal is not to get an instant purchase from consumers, but to get the customer interested as they search a companies’ social/mobile web, and potentially gain a customer for life.

Relationships with customers are directly linked to the value companies get in return from investment in social media. With Twitter, it should not be a brand’s objective to sell the most products by tweeting. Instead, Twitter should be used to inform customers and show them all about their brands’ experience so they understand what the brand is all about, not just what they’re selling.

The stronger the connection brands have with their customers, the more likely those customers will be inclined to buy into the brand for life. Some ROI models for social media are focused on a direct marketing approach, also known as an offer and response approach. The problem with that is that companies end up chasing a platform where their target market might be, instead of understanding how to influence that target market with a social experience. Companies need to stop focuses on seeing ROI from social media coming strictly through direct sales!

Strong, productive social media marketing will influence business outcomes, just as a good public relations campaign will. Positive media coverage leads to awareness and inspires interest and discovery of the brand. Social experiences can provide brand-advertising benefits and push consumers to purchase sooner, and/or more often.

When it comes to social media marketing, most markers are just chasing popular platforms with their own ideas of what they think will motivate their customers to buy. But, what they should be doing instead is interpreting customer preferences and optimize their efforts to address the kinds of social experiences that will bring about a purchase and gain loyal customers. Social media is a platform to help businesses serve customer needs throughout a lifecycle, not just during a time of peak sales. With this in mind, new opportunities in social media marketing are available for those businesses willing to be influenced by their consumers!

 

 

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Different Attitudes Towards Social Media Between Consumers and Marketers


 

New survey data suggests that marketers are disconnected from the attitudes of their targeted consumers. About 60% of consumers have ended engagement with several brands due to poorly targeted communication.

This data comes from Experian, an information services firm, which surveyed 1000 consumers and 330 Australian marketing professionals from government, technology, retail, digital, travel and financial service industries.

At the top of the list of consumers’ most preferred way to engage with brands was through giveaways and incentives. In fact, 70% placed this method in their top three ways to receive information from brands.

Regarding brand websites, marketers and consumers were in agreement, with about 91% and 85% claiming websites were the most important source of information on brands and product services.

There was however, a disconnection found in attitudes regarding print and social media. 70% of consumers seem to value print media, and 60% value direct mail more than social media, while marketers see print media as one of the least important sources of information. Only 28% of markers felt print media was an important channel for communicating.

The survey also found that in looking at consumer trust of marketing channels, surprisingly, consumers aren’t as trustful of newer channels like social media and SMS for communicating with brands. About 30% of consumers placed social media at the bottom three trusted channels, with only 4% claiming social media was the channel they trusted the most.

General manager of Experian Marketing Solutions, Matt Glasner, feels this distrust may come from the relative infancy of social media’s use in marketing, along with the fact that while 89% of Australian marketers now utilize a customer segmentation strategy in general, this strategy may not be applied to newer communication channels, like social media.

Glasner also claims that this is comparable to examining where email and EDM marketing was five years ago. “The challenges uncovered by the research are similar to the barriers we saw five or so years ago when customers lacked trust in emails and EDMs. Yet, for many brands, these are now common place communication channels which are highly valued by customers.”

In the year to come, most marketers plan to increase investment in social media advertising. “Marketers are working hard to ensure their messages are heard. However, our research highlights that there is still a huge opportunity for marketers to further understand how and when consumers want to engage across all channels, including social media,” says Glasner.

Glasner thinks there’s opportunity in bringing the level of consumer segmentation seen in traditional channels to social media campaigns, and worries that the age of multichannel marketing comes with the challenge of information overload, therefore marketers must be more selective than ever in their choices of communication!

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Business and Marketing Trends in Social Media in 2012!

 

 

 

What’s going to happen in the New Year with social media? Social Media is expanding quickly and marketers everywhere are catching up! Look out for these trends to come.

Disappearing Social Media Marketing:

Social media is becoming an integral part of all aspects in marketing our businesses. Therefore, social media marketing will be included in overall marketing plans; it won’t be a separate tool. Just like email marketing or SEO, social media will be a vital activity.

Integrating Social Media:

Big brands will start using social media more to connect to customers through user-generated content. This helps businesses get the most out of their true customers and loyal fans.

Supporting Social Media:

The integration of social media into marketing will result in people reporting their problems through their channel of choice. Companies should try and find ways to avoid having their social media channels turn into a mere helpdesk, but social media integration will indeed let consumer problems be handled by peers.

Increasing Social Sales:

Customers will get a stronger real user experience before making purchase decisions with social media integration. People can make purchase decisions based on a brand’s marketing materials and receive feedback from existing customers through ratings, comments and reviews.

Leveling off of Group Buying Sites:

Group buying sites will level off. They will not go away, but businesses will better understand how it works and use it accordingly. With group buying sites, businesses buy an opportunity to allow potential consumers to sample their offering at a discounted rate with the hope of getting continuous business.

Growing ROI:

Social media ROI is an important topic and still less than half of marketers claim to see it. As budgets grow, social media will become more important in a brand’s marketing mix. ROI will be seen through direct sales from Facebook, or perhaps more conversion rates of people from social channels.

Growing Social Media Advertising:

Social media channels are trying to find ways to get at your advertising budget so they can turn a profit. Social media sites are looking at new ways to display more marketing messages to users. This will result in larger budgets dedicated to social media advertising.

Mobilizing Websites:

More businesses will start making their sites mobile. 10 years ago companies began making websites because other companies were, now companies will start making their sites mobile as more and more companies are starting to!

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