Customer Engagement: Part 1- Essential Best Practices For Social Media Success
Once you’ve figured out how to best utilize your social media accounts as a business, the next step is to figure out how to get the most engagement out of your customers and followers. If you want to learn the basics to becoming a social media pro, check out our previous article, Social Media Q&A with XrossWorld’s Julio Cerne Chaves.
Why Does Engagement Matter?
Social media engagement is vital for an e-commerce business for many reasons. First, it allows you to see how well your business is being received by others. You can see what aspects of your business and products people enjoy as well as areas you can change or improve upon.
Engagement is also an important factor in keeping your current customers happy and expanding to new customers. If you post content that intrigues your audience, they will feel compelled to like and comment on your posts. Additionally, they will share your content with their friends and family who can then become new customers, continuing the engagement cycle.
Below are 12 best practices that we’ve compiled through industry leaders when it comes to customer engagement for an e-commerce business:
6 Ways To Engage With Your Customers
1. Spotlights: When people are looking through your social media or website content, try to highlight specific people, places, or things that will catch their eye. Oftentimes, this will be a spotlight on a new product or a product that stands out to you. Spotlights are also a great place to showcase your employees, allowing customers to get to know the people behind your business.
Customer spotlights are also a great way to engage with your followers. If someone has a story to tell about using your product or simply posted a great photo of themselves with your product, don’t be afraid to show it off. Customer spotlights are also the kinds of posts that customers will share on their social media, attracting more people to your business. Of course, make sure you have their permission, especially if it is a personal story.
2. Behind the Scenes: Instead of keeping your behind-the-scenes processes hidden from your customers, pull back the curtain to show them how your operations work. Snap a photo of team members working, show off your workspace, or go live while you’re packing orders to be shipped out. This is your time to get creative and really showcase everything that goes into getting items to your customers.
3. How-To: If your customers are receiving an item that requires instructions, why not make a video showing how it’s done? While a written pamphlet of directions sent with the product will get the job done, a video of yourself demonstrating the steps is more fun and personable. Customers can also share this video with friends and family to show them how easy it is to use your product.
4. Physical Store Safety/Health Measures: While you might not think of this as “fun” content to post, people are going to want to see it, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Show off your latest health department score or record the precautions your employees take to make sure orders are packed in a sanitary manner. People will appreciate and trust your transparency.
5. Promotions/Specials: What’s a promotion if you don’t promote it, right? If there’s any kind of special sale or event going on at your store, make sure that it’s being posted about on all of your social media platforms. If the sale is long-running or the event is happening in the near future, occasionally remind your followers in additional posts as well.
6. Expand Beyond Original Content: Finally, it is okay to post content that is not originally yours, as long as you link or cite your source. Share a customer tweet to your feed, add posts with your business tagged to your Instagram story, or share a link to an interesting article that is relevant to your brand. This will diversify the type of content you’re posting as well as give you a break from constant original content.
6 Things You Don’t Want to Do
1. Poor Visual Quality Content: You don’t have to be a professional photographer or videographer to be successful on social media, but make sure that what you’re posting is visually pleasing and easy to understand. If your product photos are blurry or poorly lit, people aren’t going to take your business seriously. Do your research and find out how you can best utilize the tools that you have. Additionally, when creating posts that need a quality stock image, consult a free-to-use website where the photos are high quality and legal to use.
2. Irrelevant/Out of Context Content: While it’s great to let your customers get to know you on a personal level, don’t treat your business accounts as if they were your own personal social media accounts. Unless it’s relevant to your business, refrain from discussing politics, religion, and other topics that might cause unnecessary turbulence within your customer and fan base.
3. Misleading or False Information: If you share anything that you are claiming to be factual to your customers, it must actually be factual. For instance, if your product is simply proven to help with weight loss, you can not make a post guaranteeing each user will drop 10 pounds. The minute something seems fishy or unfactual with your e-commerce store, customers will leave. The internet is riddled with con artists and scammers, so if customers get even a whiff of that in looking at your social media or website, it’s game over.
4. Linking Curated Content you Haven’t Evaluated: If something is good enough to be shared with your audience, it’s good enough for you to take the time to fully understand what it is. If you link an article you merely glanced over or a video you didn’t actually watch, many problems can arise. The content you shared runs the risk of containing fowl language, obscene topics, or a number of other things you might not want associated with your brand. Customers could see this and be potentially turned off from your business.
5. Too Much Content/Spam: While consistent content is key, there is a point where this can turn into spam. Don’t harass your customers constantly with repetitive posts. Rather than keeping them engaged, too many posts will drive them away. Make sure that there is purpose and meaning in everything you post and you’re not just trying to fill up space.
6. Clickbait Posts: Finally, don’t bait your customers with promises that you can’t fulfill. If you claim to be doing a free giveaway or a contest, customers are going to be upset if this simply isn’t true. Providing false information will not be tolerated by your customers, and it will result in your business being seen as a scam. If you have a solid product or service, there’s no need for gimmicks to trick customers into being interested. If your product or service is good, customers will support you.
By applying these best practices to your social media, customers should begin interacting with you and your platforms more often. Wondering how to best handle that interaction? Tune in next week for our next blog post, Customer Engagement: Part 2 — Essential Best Practices For Customer Interaction.
What’s your favorite kind of post on social media? Let us know!
Originally published at https://www.soap-bx.com on September 17, 2020.
