Social media helps businesses to build long lasting customer relationships because of real-time connectivity and increased visibility. The biggest advantage that social media provides is the ability to create unlimited promotional content for free and to top it you don’t necessarily have to pay to access valuable leads. The key question however is, how to build customer relationships on social media?
Business Marketing and acquiring new customers is certainly a challenge to set up any successful business. Developing trust among target audience and prospects is important to establish long-lasting customer relationships. After realizing the sheer importance of customer relationship many business owners nowadays use social media to generate and engage leads.
What is the importance of building customer relationships on social media?
Social media has certainly transformed the way business owners interact with their customers using real-time communication and feedback capability available on various social media platforms. Besides connecting with many prospective customers, it is also essential to build and nurture customer relationships on social media to retain them. Strong social media relationships not only help in building your business reputation but also with word-of-mouth marketing.
So, the importance of customer relationships is that when your customers become passionate about your business, they will not only keep buying from you, but also tell their friends and family about your product or service. Building strong customer relationships increases customer loyalty, reduces customer turnover, and improves customer lifetime value (CLV). Above all, it’s smarter to keep loyal customers and keep building customer relationships than to try to win new customers.
How do you build customer relationships on social media?
Engaging with customers on social media is a bit tricky, and it does require conscious and intentional planning. These 7 effective recommendations will help you improve your social media marketing and customer relationship goals.
Create reliable social proof of your business
Online businesses are primarily dependent on customers’ trust and persuasion. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Houzz, etc. are great audio and visual platforms for showcasing your work and telling clients what they will get from your business. Documents, images, and videos of your work provide social proof of your venture, increase credibility and help convince customers that you are the right person for the job.
People on social media are more likely to interact with reliable people or brands. For this reason, corporate executives should consider encouraging a social media presence where they share news and content on social media in a more personal way. Social media algorithms often prioritize personal accounts over business accounts. You may also engage a Social Media Manager or Brand Manager to establish your brand reputation on social media.
Start conversations with your prospective customers
Small businesses can boost their revenue by establishing trustworthy conversations with their audiences on social media, and the most popular among them is Facebook. It has the largest pool of digital markets. Facebook marketplace is an easy-to-find solution for most businesses, and all you need to do is to create posts that encourage comments. When people start commenting, they are more likely to take ownership of the conversation and share it among their connections, which usually become a referral.
So, every post you create on social media provides an opportunity to encourage further interaction with your followers. If you only post and don’t engage with your followers in the comments, you’re missing out on a great opportunity to improve your social media and customer relationship strategy. So, you need to be an active participant in social media conversations. Participating in potentially awkward conversations and providing clarifications is a great way to improve relationships and build positive brand awareness on social media.
Prioritize customer feedback and respond to direct messages
Whether it’s a new product you’re launching or a new software feature, listening to and acting on customer feedback is an essential step in earning customer trust and loyalty. It shows that you prioritize their concerns and needs. Also, you are willing to work for their benefit. You need to show that you care about what your customers think by turning their suggestions and requests into action.
It’s also a great opportunity to integrate social media and customer service by encouraging customers to send direct messages and prioritizing responses. As most consumers want to publicly respond to social media posts, it will help to establish a strong brand trust in your product when they scroll through the positive comments.
Personalize customer experiences with live chat sessions
Personalization is another great way to build customer relationships as they can realize their demands and expectations are specially taken care of. You may consider adding a live chat widget to your website for customer support and responding to customer questions on a real-time basis. Once the customers can speak to real people, it will provide them an authentic empathetic experience and thus improve the brand’s trust.
Live chat builds long-term relationships, and forging long-term customer relationships is absolutely essential for business sustainability. Because it increases satisfaction and improves the customer experience. Any business owner who understands the importance of customer relationship knows that satisfied customers are less likely to switch to competitors which in turn helps them to thrive in their online business.
Track your media mentions and acquire PR on social media
A social mention occurs whenever a targeted keyword, brand, or hashtag is used on social media posts. There are four key metrics to determine a social mention, which are strength, sentiment, passion, and reach. It will help to identify the right audience, monitor brand reputation, gain customer insights, and do much more.
Understanding how to find, monitor, and respond to social mentions in online conversations is a great skill for marketers to master. Media tracking is an automated process of scanning media for keywords and topics that are identified as relevant to your brand and your PR campaigns. Several useful online tools are available to track social mentions to further analyze and track social standings.
Educate your social media followers with useful information
Different types of content are available on social media. Some of them are more promotional in nature and tap on to the desire of customers’ to get the best deals. However, you need to make sure there is a balance between your promotional content like offers, discount codes, etc and the educational valuable content such as how to choose the best product, DIY guides, etc.
Ultimately, it is important to understand that social media followers choose to follow an account mostly because they believe it adds some value. That’s why you should create content that helps people to solve, learn, and explore. The content you create for brand promotion must be informative and helpful to your audience and not be focused on trying to sell or promote only your own product.
Create inviting promotional offers and attractive incentives
Another effective method of building customer relationships and acquiring new customers via social media is by providing attractive offers and incentives on various social media handles. Social media platforms provide a balanced platform for both business owners and customers to benefit from the promotional schemes. It is a win-win situation for both, as the business owners get more revenue through existing as well as new customers, while the customers on the other hand get unparalleled deals which they can’t miss.
The customer acquisition process begins with building awareness and creating interest among prospective audiences, and discounts are a proven way to reach a higher number. Consumers are attracted to discounts and tend to share discounts through social platforms. It is an efficient way to reach new customers while keeping customer acquisition costs down.
The bottom line
For building reliable customer relationships, it is essential to focus on building social communities. And for that you can create your own Facebook group and engage with your prospective audience there, or start a community, or explore other platforms that are great for community building, or via your brand hashtags. This is a great way to get people to know and talk about your brand, especially when you sell it online.
As discussed earlier, the importance of customer relationships is pretty high and it directly or indirectly helps in brand promotion, therefore every business must focus on building and maintaining excellent customer relationships.