Things you must do to win customers through social media

Having a strong social media presence is essential for every brand. However, to effectively harness the power of social media, you need to make sure that you’re sending the right messages at all times. The wrong approach can turn-off and disengage followers and this could affect a brand’s image and revenue. Becoming a social media expert isn’t difficult. You just need to know a few fundamentals before you dive in. Here are some tips on how to use social media to attract customers:

Engage. Engage. Engage.

Social media followers initially get attracted to your brand because they’re interested in what you have to offer. Now that you have followers, the next thing that you must do is keep them engaged. Engagement is the heart of social media, without it any message you put out is simply noise that no one wants to hear. Engaging an audience doesn’t mean posting ads about your business or hard selling. It means starting friendly conversations and building relationships with people in your network. You can do this by offering helpful information or promotions that add value to your brand. Also, make sure that that you always respond back to comments and even complaints. This shows followers that you appreciate the engagement. It also encourages them to continue commenting on your posts.

Grow your reach

Organic reach is great but if you really want to win audiences, you need invest in paid reach. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn offer business tools that can help you reach more people outside of your network. Paid advertising gives you results fast. Paying also ensure that you are seen. Based on recent a study done by HubSpot, Facebook users are now seeing only 2% of organic pages they follow on their feed and the rest are from paid advertising.

And here’s a simple yet effective way to use the top three social networks mentioned above:

Facebook – this is where you build your community of brand advocates. A brand advocate is a customer who talks favorably about your brand and then shares positive messages about your brand with other people.

Twitter – this is where you can engage in conversation with your peers. These are your business partners, other startup founders, vendors, and suppliers.

LinkedIn – this is where you directly contact your active leads.

Don’t overwhelm your audience

Here’s the thing, you can engage but whatever you do, don’t overwhelm your followers. There’s nothing more annoying than a business that overwhelms its followers with a new post every hour. What you can do is craft high-quality posts and post these a few times a day. The right time to post is also important. According to research, posts published from 1 pm to 4 pm have the best chance of getting noticed and shared.

Understand analytics

Use analytics to analyze your post’s performance. Analytics will show you which of your posts are driving traffic and conversions to your website. Once you know the style of content that works best, you can tailor your next content accordingly.