Social media has changed the online marketing landscape. Marketing energies, focus and resources have shifted from one place to another!
With new social media platforms coming up, marketers are assured that social media is here to stay. But there is something they are not getting right!
Most of the marketers are focusing primarily on fan numbers and followers. Fans joining the fan pages, follower numbers may look exciting on surface but it has to translate into revenue numbers or increased customer enthusiasm and this is something which many social media marketers are missing out on.
Marketers need to ask themselves the right kind of questions.
- Is the social media campaign resulting into any customer engagement with the brand?
- What is level of their engagement?
- What is resulting out of the engagement?
- Are the fans / followers being tracked?
- Who are they?
- Do they actually use our products or services? Are they aspiring buyers?
Now this is vital, because continued engagement results from rewarding the followers. Often in the chase for fan numbers we end up giving incentives to people who don’t impact our business, directly or indirectly.
Giving away incentives would be leveraging the losses by spending time, resources, energy on people who are not our target audience.
The need is to focus on followers / fans which are your target audience. People who choose to associate with you without caring for the incentive are actually the ones who love your brand. They are more likely to attract prospective customers by a positive word of mouth than anyone else.
The key to social media success is investing your energy here, engaging them. It is also true that they will be keener on quality content from you than reward or incentive programs. This way you ensure that only those who are actually useful to your business stay with and follow you.
Remember too many followers posting content unnecessarily actually dissuades your important customers not to engage any more on that flat form.
The reward – their quality and quantity of their response to your content is incredible. It helps your business grow, the right feedback, right suggestions help you customize more and makes them happier in turn.
Does it impact the bottom-line significantly?
Your followers engaging in communication with you through tweets and comments means that content makes sense to them. If you are listening, it translates into product improvisation and purchase decisions and more referrals from customers.