Being where your customers are is common-sense business logic.
With the rise of social media platforms over the past decade, there’s now more ways than ever to truly be amongst your customers’ stomping grounds. Instead of shouting at them from a billboard, ads for your product or service can sit next to family photos and updates in a Facebook or Instagram field. Not only can your brand find a new pool of customers based on demographics, interests, niches and all kinds of particulars, but a carefully curated social media presence can become a building block for a long-term relationship.
Understanding a strong social media presence is important – that’s the easy part. Keeping up with the hungry machines? That’s something else altogether.
As usual, where there’s a will, there’s an automation way. Here’s a few easy ways you can increase your social media activity without directly increasing your time investment.
Integration via your CRM. CRMs such as Zoho offers the functionality of post creation, publishing and bulk scheduling via Zoho Social. You can also monitor keywords from within the same dashboard in order to guide and allocate targeted advertising spends. For social media managers looking to keep workflows concise, investigating your CRM’s built-in social media offerings may be the name of the game.
Make the most of an app such as Buffer. Buffer’s a great tool that’s easy to use without skimping on the comprehensive analytics offerings. Buffer gives you the tools you need to plan, schedule and publish regular social media posts across a multitude of platforms. Beyond that, you can also dive into how your posts perform, providing you with insight into what’s landing with your customers and what’s not performing as well as it could. Buffer users benefit from constant upgrades and are in good company alongside other users such as Microsoft, Trello, Shopify and GitHub.
Put Chatbots to work. How much time could you save your customer service team by having a friendly chatbot answer incoming enquiries instead? Chatbots can be designed to communicate in a valuable and intuitive way with your existing and potential customer base. As well as answering questions, providing links to FAQ resources, completing orders and sending customers in the right direction for the help of a human, chatbots can be customized to communicate in a way that suits your company’s brand and tone. Serious, inquisitive, playful – whatever kind of experience you’d like your customer to have with a chatbot representative, it’s all possible. Check out our further coverage on chatbot capabilities here.
I’ve said it before, but for those in the back: automation’s about working smarter, not harder. By creating intuitive methods of customer engagement from right within their social media platform of choice, you’re able to build ongoing customer relationships and appeal to new leads.
Now, if automation can figure out how to make our content go as viral as tomorrow’s new dog video, we’ll be done and dusted.