Learn to Approach Social Media Effectively

Social media is an extremely powerful way to communicate directly with your customers. The key is to approach it as a way to communicate, though, never to sell. Learning to approach social media effectively is necessary to find any value in it.

I’m going to cover three things you can do to help your business benefit from social media. The three things I’ll go over may require you to shift how you are used to approaching social media, but they’ll help benefit your business in the long run.

Business impact: If you practice these three things, you’ll start to build trust with your fans and followers. Trust is a necessary ingredient for people to do business with you. They need the confidence that you know your stuff and have been doing it long enough. Social media is the perfect opportunity to build the relationships and trust that will lead to customers seeking your services.

Let Your Authentic Self Shine

Sometimes it’s hard to let your own personality come through if you’re sitting behind a brand image. It’s important to let your own personality through, though. People want to know who it is they’re talking to especially if it’s a picture of a brand logo, not a person.

There are a few things you can do to help yourself do this and help people see the person behind your brand account.

1. If you’re the only person behind your brand, consider using a picture of yourself rather than your brand logo. It’s more personal to see a face not a faceless brand logo.
2. If you’re running a brand account with many people behind it, make sure people know the name of the specific person behind each message in a conversation. Just add a simple -Name after the message and the conversation becomes more human.

That’s it! People expect to converse with a person on social media. Social media has the word social in it for a reason. Sometimes it can be hard to be social without knowing there’s a person behind the account.

Building trust with potential customers is a necessary step for any business who hopes to get a customer and keep a relationship with them. The trust you build will not only allow you to get new customers, it’ll keep them coming back.

Help Employees Represent Your Brand

If you have a few, or a few hundred, employees then you have many great resources to represent your brand. Encouraging your employees to be present on social media gives you a further and more personal reach to potential customers.

A hope of building relationships with your customers is to eventually have some of them reach the brand ambassador level. That can take a lot of time but with employees who know your brand and love what you’re doing, they are already brand ambassadors! Use that resource wisely and allow them to represent you.

Trust is built on how much you know and listen to your customers. It’s also built by being an authority in your industry. Social media is an excellent place to show that you are an authority in your industry. Because your brands’ knowledge is represented by your employees best, they’re the best one to represent your brand on social media.

Show Behind the Scenes

You may be wondering how this will help impact your business on social media. It always goes back to building trust and relationships. Showing customers behind the scenes of your business can help grow your relationships.

Trust cannot be made without a relationship first. Going behind the scenes of your business gives customers a window into how you do business. People are curious and interested in connecting on a personal level with a brand they love. Going behind the scenes is a great way to build a personal connection.

Instagram is one of the most popular social networks for sharing behind the scenes pics. If you’re present on Instagram, show some behind the scenes pics.  It can be done on other networks too, but will probably have the biggest effect on Instagram.

Here are some ideas on what you could share:

• Do you build a product? Show some pics of the manufacturing process or equipment.
• Show some pictures of your office and how the work gets done. If there’s any physical relic of how you get stuff done, show it! (sticky note wall?)
• If you and your employees all work remote, where do you work? If at a coffee shop, it might be fun to see how you work there.

Behind the scenes could even mean behind the work. Everybody has hobbies beyond work and they may make your brand more personal. There is a fine line between oversharing personal information and professional, but it highly depending on the brand and industry. Find your balance when sharing personal time and there will be a benefit of better relationships.

Business Growth on Social Media

Making direct sales on social media and promoting products directly is a hard sell on social media, possibly impossible. If you have built a strong relationship, though, you’re one step closer. Social media allows you to easily grow relationships with customers and helps bring them closer to being your customer.

Social media has a place in every stage of the sales funnel, but it does excel in some more than others. Social media can give you qualified leads better than other ways because of the trust it helps build.

Go out there and show the personal side behind your brand. Your customers will love it, you’ll keep them as customers longer, and leads will be better qualified because of the time you put in to build trust.

Keep in mind when using social media that you should never try to sell. Social media is all about building relationships and helping people. If you can be helpful and build relationships then you’ll never have to sell. Remember, not ABC (always be closing) but ABH (always be helping).