How to Be a Hit on Social Media

Being relevant to your followers means more than personalizing emails with their name. You need to understand what motivates them, and how that relates to your brand, your company, and your products. You should prioritize making sure every contact customers have with your company conveys the degree of respect you hold for them, so they are reassured why they have chosen your company.

The most successful companies on social media have several things in common: they have a demonstrable respect for what drives their customers and prospects (clearly not faked), they have the same interests as their customers, and they are incredibly consistent across the platforms. Here are a few other lessons you can apply:

A. Speak your customer’s language(s)

Make content like ThinkGeek does, a company that carries thought-provoking items with high nerd appeal. Their product descriptions are peppered with inside jokes, references to geek culture that their customers understand and love. One of their recent email subject lines read, “ThinkGeek less than threes you” [i.e., <3].

One of the most amazing examples is on their Facebook page, when a fan posted an update in binary code. Not only did ThinkGeek respond in kind, their comment raised additional responses – all also in binary. That is speaking your customer’s language!

B. Be human

It is important to present your customers with a consistent and human voice behind the company face. Creating posts that highlight the people behind the web presence encourages your customers to relate to you.

Blog posts highlighting and introducing members of the team, pictures and descriptions of team building activities and adventures, team members taking turns guest posting articles on activities or interests relating to customer and products, and news articles that will pique interest are all great ways to relate to your customers. Even better is when your post encourages interaction and responses!

C. Engagement, not selling!

Consider splitting your company feeds into two separate identities: one for acquisition, and the other for engaging customers. Twitter is optimal for this exercise. This helps both you and the customer in several ways. For one, you are able to keep customer acquisition channels separate from customer retention, meaning you and your customers are never confused about the messages being sent. Additionally, you will be able to focus and perfect the tone of each channel, and see what resonates best with users. Customer retention might have a more playful and witty voice, while customer acquisition will be more informative, discussing new products and services.

D. Let your customers express themselves

Make sure you devote website space (and team member effort) to encouraging customer engagement. This is so important! Engagement with your products is half the fun, and you want to show clear appreciation for fan experience.

This can be expressed in many different ways. Things like featuring rotating customer reviews on the website, giving points for writing reviews, holding contests based on user engagement – such as through an Instagram contest, or one hosted on the site – or even just providing the capacity for users to upload photos and videos of the product in action, can all be great ways to encourage customer expression.

E. Integrate marketing and customer service on the regular

If you have great customer service, your customers are going to want to talk about it – and tweet about it, and post about it. When they do, the best thing your marketing feed can do is pick up on those responses, and already know what is going on.

How do you handle this? Simple: keep your team members connected via Slack or other messaging service, and constantly able to update each other on developments in customer service or online. Customers will be thrilled to see your Twitter feed not only picking up on the accolades they give to your employees, but already in the know about great customer service happenings!

This kind of engagement is not always easy to cultivate, and it must happen organically through the enthusiasm of your employees and your customers. That being said, this opportunity is out there for any company whose employees believe in and love what they do!