Social Media Strategy – Social Engagement and Feedback

As part of the series on ‘why your business needs a strategy for social media marketing’, here are more steps with practical advice.

Step 4: Engage your audience

With social media it is important to get to know your audience. Knowing who your audience is and what they do on the Social Web is just as important as knowing what your business objectives are.

There are two broad categories of people on the Social Web, those that don’t participate at all (only read blogs, follow what others are doing) to those that are very active and who generate large amounts of content within their networks.

Your plan needs to take this into account.  If your audience is more like the first category and you want them to provide feedback on a product for example, you’ll need to figure out how you’ll get them to participate.

If they’re part of the second category they participate all the time so this won’t be a problem for them.  The sites that your audience prefer to use, will determine which channels you’ll use. If your audience is mostly on Twitter it’s not going to help if all your efforts are focused on users of Facebook.  Now you may wonder how do you figure out your audience?

ACTION: Start figuring out who your audience is by engaging them in a conversation. Spend a few days posting examples and questions you’d like your audience to answer.

Ask questions on various sites, blogs and social networks. You’ll very soon start getting an idea who your audience is and what’s important to them. You’ll also see what social media tools they’re using.

Step 5: Social feedback

As a business owner and marketer your job is to tell customers or potential customers about your product. You convey the benefits of using your product, its features and why they should buy it.

Increasingly people are turning to the web and seek the social feedback from others who have directly experienced your product, service or brand.

A perfect example of this is the readers’ reviews section on Amazon. How often have you read what other’s had to say about a particular book before you decided to buy it or not?

This is the Social Feedback cycle and it’s exactly why the Social Web is so important to your business. The social feedback cycle also provides you with an excellent opportunity to improve your service.

ACTION: Start off by following the conversation about your product online.  Then use the information you gathered to make improvements to the product, which will then in turn influence the conversation.

Follow up on what your customers are telling you. Take the feedback customers are giving you and do something about it! It will encourage them to participate and engage more.

The next Steps,  “selecting your social media tools and identifying metrics” will be covered in the next post. Please subscribe to the RSS not to miss the future posts on why your business needs a social media strategy.