A social business strategy is only as strong as its ability to meet the needs of the social customers, prospects and community members it serves. Knowing and delighting your social customer is one of the most powerful opportunities brands have in social.
Next week I’ll be exploring that exact subject with Social Business News’ own Michael Brito of Edelman and Amy Kalm of Intuit in a webinar about sprucing up social in time for Spring. We’ll be discussing how to keep the “hive” buzzing by providing consistently compelling experiences that matter to your audience.
So what does knowing and delighting your social customers entail?
Monitoring what’s being said
About you. The topics relevant to your brand. And yes, even your competitors. It sounds obvious, but there are no lack of public conversations taking place that can help you get smarter about what matters to your customers and constituents. Bonus: they are publicly available.
Diving Deep into Behavior
Is your audience spending more time on Twitter than Facebook? Do they spend more time talking about a specific set of topics or interest areas? Understanding natural behavior preferences helps guide how you can best reach the people that matter most.
Identifying successful engagement interactions
The truth is, your brand probably puts out content and opportunities to engage every day that can teach you about engagement patterns. Pictures getting more comments than videos. More retweets being made about questions than links to news. Each of these small nuggets of insight illustrates the ways your social customers are most likely to interact with your brand. They can also help you make decisions on specific tactics that make significant differences over time.
Optimizing Content for optimal experiences
All communication contains content. And content is possibly the most powerful weapon in any social program arsenal. From short-form Tweets about company news to promoted Facebook posts about deals and offers, knowing what content best resonates helps brands find ways to optimize what they say, when they say it and how they say it. Exploring what gets shared most often to what yields radio silence in terms of feedback and impressions helps social professionals find and optimize the content that strikes a chord.
Acting on engagement opportunities
Customers don’t expect to only passively receive messages from your company. They want answers to questions, help with finding the information they are searching for and to know they have a helpful ally behind your Facebook profile picture and Twitter avatar. Respond to their needs. Even better, proactively engage them and take the first step in building stronger ties.
Delighting your customer, all day, every day
There’s no one blueprint to keeping customers happy. But the truth is, if you delight a customer today, they’ll stay a customer tomorrow. And then they’ll tell their friends about you. Find what that “delight” is and keep surprising your audience with positive, meaningful interactions.
Join us next week to continue the discussion, find more “seeds” of wisdom and hear examples from a brand like Intuit who is leading the charge in making customer delight a daily goal.
We’d also love for you to chime in online at #SocialSpruce and help share ideas and proven practices with what’s working for you.
