Social media platforms are excellent for growing relationships, promoting your business, improving the client experience, and even offering customer service.
However, let's get to the point: social media listening helps marketers and researchers expand their brands. Social media provides you with the ideal tools to create interesting conversations with your community and offer first-rate social customer service, in addition to listening to what your consumers say about your brand and responding to it. Additionally, it enables you to find fresh prospective sales possibilities and raise client loyalty.
Could proactive outreach work well for your brand in finding potential customers? Follow the next few steps to find prospective sales possibilities on social media.
Step #1: Set Up & Monitor A Keyword Search
Before engaging with potential customers, you must first understand how people are referring to your brand by monitoring the appropriate conversations. To take advantage of these chances, create a new topic in your social media tool and make your keyword query as specific as possible.
Keep an eye out for the following indications when monitoring your brand to ensure you're not missing any inquiries or complaints.
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Understand customers who contact your brand through a generic Twitter account or a specific customer support account.
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Customers or prospective clients who mention you and your brand without linking to your account.
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People talk about specific problems or ask about specific concerns relevant to your company. For instance, depending on the kind of goods or services you provide, "I need better insurance" or "I need a new car" may be pertinent keywords to monitor.
Make a new, distinct topic with a targeted keyword search to enable proactive outreach. Choose the keywords that are relevant to your brand. After setting this up, you can return to that topic periodically and adjust the keyword search to ensure you're still keeping track of the relevant mentions.
Step #2: Create Detailed Engagement Guidelines
Make sure everyone on your team follows clear rules to ensure everyone is on the same page. Your social media outreach needs to be coordinated if you want to be effective and maintain a consistent brand message. Without a clear plan, don't just start doing it; you'll soon realize your efforts aren't working.
When designing engagement rules for your social media team to adhere to, keep the following practical advice in mind:
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One of many businesses' top concerns is that they'll end up sounding too exploitative or spammy if they invade people's privacy. Utilize a real person's Twitter account to connect with them and engage in conversation. Make sure the profiles have a genuine and natural feel if your team is engaged with their individual Twitter accounts to offer your business a human face.
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There isn't an ideal conversation starter. However, there is one unbreakable rule: keep it as brief as possible. Also, try to avoid being too direct (but be careful not to be false or misleading, too!). Consumers dislike pushy sales tactics and don't want to be the target of your business sales pitch.
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Be positive in your tone. People will quickly tune out your communications if you are too forceful. Your message will easily connect with your audience if you include a sense of humor in it.
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Create five to ten tweets that you may utilize and modify after you start actively responding. Bring them completely in line with your brand. To prevent posting anything off-brand, ensure an approval process is in place.
Step #3: Master Proactive Outreach
Proactive outreach shouldn't require substantial training if you already use social media for branding or customer service goals. It's a continuation of the best social media strategies you've already employed. You must, however, have flexibility if you want to set goals and then modify them as you go. Additionally, have the flexibility to change topics and modify your responses depending on the audience.
To find the important conversations, substantial labeling or tagging is required.
Keep a comprehensive overview of the replies, marking complaints and clearly designating what they are about. You need solid and comprehensive metrics to analyze your lead generation efforts and track the ROI.
Create reports based on these tags to track how often you make proactive outreach and maintain a broad understanding of the brand. Label both good mentions and broken-down complaints in addition to negative ones. Encourage your staff to share their triumphs. Proactively reaching out only succeeds if you pool your resources and function well as a team. Truly make it a collaborative effort.
Moving forward
The key to success on social media is your ability to effectively promote your offer while engaging your target audience, which may be a tricky balance.
The bottom line is that you must communicate the value of your product while also giving customers on each social media site the kind of experience they want. And social media listening plays a vital role in this. It helps in identifying what your customers are talking about.
If you can achieve that balance, the time and money you invest in developing relationships on social media will yield a significant return.
