Steps to Cashing in on your Social Media Currency

Social media is a social tool of communication. Social media not only provides us the information, but also interacts with us while giving us that information. Social media is free! Ok not totally as we give personal information away which allows the Social networks to sell advertising. Plus it opens up business oppertunities.

It’s a two-sided conversation, through social media; businesses can talk to their customers, ask their opinion, ask them questions and deal with their issues. While engaging leads to convert to customers.

It is an important marketing tool which helps the company share information with their followers, hoping that these followers will share the information with their friends. This way company’s messages can be spread – with the hope of going viral. (PS Most things actually go viral by accident.)

Which in turn helps in building the company’s online reputation and trust factor. Sooner or later, this trust results in increasing the sales, because people prefer buying from the companies they trust.

To successfully utilising social media, you need to put in time. And it can be hard to calulate a ROI for it! You need to plan properly and learn how it really works. Monetising your social media is about building relationships, so the focus should be on creating a trust relationship by giving away great content and valuable advice. Businesses need to come up with the creative ways to communicate online, engage with the audience and get them talking about their brand. In the old days they used to call it link bait but now its about sharability and engagement.

Here are some ways:

Pay-with-a-tweet concept

Many businesses are coming up with creative ways to engage their audience and get them talking about the brand. This is what Kellogg’s did with their twitter campaign when people of London were able to claim snacks for their tweets. The company effectively increased the word of mouth around its new product by getting so many people tweeting about the same topic.

 

 

Improve Your Customer Service

Through social media sites you can have direct access to your customers. You get the chance to know about their opinion and what they feel about your business. So give a quick response and provide great customer Service. It’s funny different people prefer different platforms.

WE were looking after a realestate site for a customer and there where many individuals who did direct message via Twitter. I woud have though email would have been easier however it was not a 1 off.

Manage Customer Complaints

Social media sites let your customers leave comments on how you’re doing. When they complain or criticise your business practices, you not only get valuable feedback, but also a chance to reply and improve your image. It’s important to sort it out the issue before be goes viral. Remember GASP in Melbourne – oh what a disaster.

When you get your own hash tag it could be great but this one: Check #gaspfail hashtag for a prime example of social media crisis mismanagement.

Use new strategies

For marketing on social websites companies use different strategies like uploading their business videos, updating any new product, posting short messages, giving link to their products, giving away training, a free report, or content-rich videos and services to the world.

Make your page interactive

Social media sites are not the shopping sites; people use these sites for information gathering, communicating with relatives and friends and generally hang out. So make your page interactive to grab their attention, to get them involved and spend time.

Develop a trust relationship

Give away great content and valuable advice and follow most effective social media strategies for creating a trus

t and building a relationship with their online community. It’s a perfect approach that can increase sales and build a reputation of your company.

Work on the feedback

Hire a social media manager who will observe, filter, measure and guide the customers’ presence on social platforms. This helps the companies know about the customers opinions about them. This monitoring process helps them find out customer’s awareness about them and form the future opportunities for them.

Advantages of social media are immense, from maintaining a social community such as blogs and forums, building up online networks, video promotion, articles and classified submission and more. It helps the businesses to get the exposure and provides dozens of opportunities to market their products and services to the world.

There are a variety of tools that can help you monitor and allow you to schedule posts. Recently have to been using BuzzBundle from Link Assitant. This has allowed us to monitor forum, QA sites and social media sites. You are able to track keywords and what and where they are being used on these sites.

Social media marketing has improved the advertising potential of the small businesses by allowing them to reach to a wide section of online audience.

Through social media, small businesses can build up comprehensive online presence enabling them to stay ahead in the competition. So come up with the innovative ideas and know how the social media is becoming the new global currency!