In the old days, the only way companies would hear from their customers was usually through an irate phone call to customer service or by reading depositions in a lawsuit or worse a media quote. But today the social networking wall has broken down that invisible concrete barrier between customer and company. Wanna’ say something to billionaire Mark Cuban? Just Tweet him.
I just chatted with the @mcuban. Can’t prove it b/c msgs go away after read. Feel like CIA. Add me cyberdust ID: ProudDad3
Now companies are scrambling to find ways to make the allusion of proximity a revenue-boosting reality. They’re using their social networks to get closer to their customers than ever before. But are consumers returning the love? If you’ve started a Twitter account, populated a Pinterest page, tricked out your Instagram, and spruced up your Facebook page yet aren’t receiving boosts in customer love you may be doing it wrong. Here are some tips on how to get the most out of your social media relationship with your customers.
10 Tips To Build Customer Loyalty On Social Media
1. Serve First, Sell Later
Consumers are savvy. They know a brand isn’t just chatting with them for the heck of it. They know you’re trying to sell. Don’t sell them on your product. Sell them your service. Make your help desk line option two. Research shows half of the consumers surveyed will more likely buy from you if they can contact you through social media. Media Bistro shares how important social media has become for our customers. Let customers quickly take care of a matter rather than letting it fester while they slog through voice prompt hell on your 1-800-number.
2. Do Your Listening
Most companies make the worst assumption about their social media account – that it’s for them. It’s not. It’s for you to listen to what your customer is saying. Even if they’re not saying it directly to you. Use social listening tools to monitor the conversations your customers are having about you to their friends, family, and others. That’s exactly what a little-known toddler clothing company called Total Bib did.
This As Seen On TV, the product was featured as a social media marketing guru was watching television with his toddler son. He Tweeted something silly about the product–it’s kind of weird like a plastic armor coat for your two-year-old–and with minutes the company had found him on Twitter, followed him, and began talking to him. It’s not uncommon to see the company Tweet out free product giveaways to people who mention their product. Listening can garner new customers but its real power is boosting the loyalty of the old ones.
3. Deliver Quick Replies
Did you know that most of Starbucks Tweets are replies to customers? And that in return 1 out of six Tweets about Starbucks is about a customer loving their brand? Yep, according to a study of top brands, Starbucks stands out as a social media customer loyalty juggernaut because it replies to its customers rather quickly. Of the four companies looked at in the Starbucks study half the time they replied to customers less than five hours after the Tweet was posted. A full 15% of the time they replied in 15 minutes or less. That’s some great response time. It’s no wonder that the majority of Tweets about Starbucks are positive.
4. Let Your Customers In
Any fan of True Blood knows once you let a vamp it you invite their horror as well. Many companies fear social media the same way thinking their customers will start airing all their dirty laundry through their Instagram stream. The reality is far different. Researchers analyzed more than 150,000 Tweets of 50 major brands and found only 22% were negative. But a full 60 percent were positive. (Love that research, don’t we.)[1] Getting close to your customers can only increase brand loyalty even if they don’t like you. Because you’ll finally figure out why and if you’re smart fix it.
5. It’s About The Customer
Selfies aside, no one wants to see inside pics of your headquarters…unless you’re the CIA. So if you’re Instagram stream is filled with pics of your employees at cubicles or your CEO’s golf game just know that’s akin to watching paint dry. Jazz up your social media stream with some pics, Tweets, and communications of your consumer actually engaging with your product. No one does this better than Coca-Cola.
Coca-cola shares images of their Norweigan fans on their Facebook page.
From asking customers to post pics of their favorite Coke bottles to asking them to update their Facebook page their favorite Coke moment, Coca-Cola has hands down is the social media customer loyalty king. Unlike other big brands who’ve fallen into a social media engagement black hole (did someone say McDonald’s) Coke has managed sit back and watch as its own customers drown out it’s critics and comes to its rescue. This case study explain their strategy well. Remember it’s not all about you and you’ll build loyalty no sweat.
6. Create Great Campaigns
The Great Recession may be over but folks are still hurting out there and nothing builds brand loyalty like helping others in need. During Valentine’s Day week Diet Coke asked its Twitter followers to “show their heart” with the hashtag “#showyourheart.” They donated $1 to a charity for every heart posted. That’s brilliant. That’s helping. That’s cool. Align your brand with a cause you actually care about and then engage your customers in that cause through social media. You’ll get brownie points for charity support but also a boost in brand loyalty.
7. Build Influence
Building brand loyalty is more complex than just Tweeting customer pics and offering giveaways. What you’re really after is emotional attachment. That’s what breeds brand loyalty. The more affinity a customer has for your company, the more likely they are to buy your product. With social media that age-old marketing adage can be rewritten to “the more affinity your customers tell others they have for your brand the more affinity you can get from their friends.” Would someone at Coke want to see the hundred of thousands of pics of their customers on their own Facebook page? Nope, they wanted all their customers’ friends to see the pics of them holding Cokes. That’s the power of influence and it’s what social media tools such as Klout was built upon.
Sony Electronic’s Pinterest Profile
It’s something Sony Electronics social media manager Callan Green realized when going through her Pinterest page. She never wanted leather pants She told the Social Media Examiner in an interview that she never wanted leather pants but when she saw them on Pinterest, she immediately went out to buy some. Sold on the power of Pinterest, Sony began a push to pimp out its Pinterest page. The result was an 800% increase in traffic from Pinterest to the Sony Store website since it first launched and four million brand impressions.
8. Your Employees are Customers Too
You may be nobody if nobody loves you but you’re certainly not winning friends if you’re own employees don’t at least like you. If every one of your employees followed you on Twitter how much would your list grow? If it grows at all you’ve missed a great opportunity. In the Sony example above, social media managers started their brand loyalty campaign with their own employees. They asked their employees to create their own Pinterest pages and invited them to share them with the brand’s page. They instantly had several hundred followers and lots of re-pins. Don’t leave your employees out when you’re brand building. They can be your best ambassadors. In fact, they should be!
9. Increase Your Visibility
It’s tough to build brand loyalty through social media if no one knows you have social media accounts. Make it monkey simple for people to share content – products, text, photos, video – to social media sites. Insert social media icons, sharing buttons, sharing prompts and so on, to enlist this type of engagement. Close the loop by linking back to your website on social media. Push customers through a content tunnel with your media right in the stream of it.
10. What Content Does Your Consumer Want?
There are all kinds of case studies on building brands through content but few do it better than Red Bull. The energy drink used to be known best for using bull semen in its product is now the official sponsor of adventurous bad asses and the people who love them. With it’s Bulletin magazine, it’s Red Bull sponsored events and it’s entire Red Bull adventure network, the king of amp has ramped up the content creation competition and is winning worldwide.
Red Bull uses social media to inform its loyal followers about the many events its hosts around the world. They create the content their followers want to see and engage them to share it. From videos, music, blogs, magazine articles, pictures the works. They push an unbelievable amount of content through their feeds. But they also match bodies with buzz hiring legions of students to talk up the products and events on campus. The entire strategy is around creating content their target customer likes and pushing them to share that content with their friends.
Redbull’s Event page on Facebook
They leveraged the networks of the adventure athletes they sponsor and promote and get their name, marketing and messages pushed through their social networks. They even have a music academy where fans can apply to make Red Bull-esque music. Yes all of this costs millions of dollars but the key here is that Red Bull didn’t create this community. The community existed. They just moved into the neighborhood and became the party house where all the other neighbors can come and gather.
When you create, don’t dominate your customer’s space. Integrate. Be apart of what they’re doing and reflect that back to them.
RecaIf you want to build brand loyalty using social media you must remember one salient point – it isn’t about you. If you remember that all the rest will fall into place. Good luck!
If you don’t have nearly $50 a month or $600 a year to spend on professional products Adobe produces, there are literally hundreds of graphic design web apps available out there for you to use. But which one? I took at look 3 of the most commonly used graphic design web app – PicMonkey, Canva and Sprites. A time limit of five minutes was used for each app because that’s all you’ll have time for when the boss rushes in and says.Give me a blog post with a creative image. These three apps are rated according to these factors:
Ease of use
Functionality
Usability of their free features
User control (the freedom to do a lot of different things without barriers)
Sprites
Website: Spritesapp.com
Cost: Free with no add-ons for extra design stuff as of yet. The website says they’re not ready to accept payment but I say they’re not ready to provide something you’d pay for.
Easy of use: When a website says “developer-friendly,” unless you speak JavaScript, interspersed with a little CSS, Ajax or JSON run for the hills. Sprites advertises itself as web-friendly needing no Flash and using HTML for its animation of imagery but the tool is just not intuitive for the non-developer. While I may not be the smartest monkey in the barrel, it took me far too long to do simple graphical additions such as image title, text on image, color changes and so on. It’s like these guys have never heard of drag & drop.
I had to hunt to find the place to upload an image instead of using the limited graphic images provided by the app. All in all, I created a subpar “animated” image that I couldn’t even download but only got an embedded URL link to, which didn’t even up work. See here. It was a bad experience.
Rating: 2 points
Functionality: The app functioned well once I figured out how it worked. I uploaded an image but took forever to place the text in the foreground instead of in the back of the image. Ever heard of “Send to Front”? For someone that would just want to demo the app, Sprites definitely makes it a troublesome process, having to sign up for an account to enjoy other basic features such as saving.
Rating: 4 points
Best Free Stuff: The free icons you can use to create infographics are pretty sparse. Even though everything is free on this app right now including the upgraded features, there isn’t much to offer here.
Rating: 2 points
User Control: There is a tremendous lack in features. You won’t be able to create an intermediate piece of design from this tool. The animation tool would only work well for someone that can design great experiences.
Rating: 4 points
Total: 12 out of 40 points(Pass on this one.)
PicMonkey
Website: Pickmonkey.com
Cost: Free to do photo editing. $4.99 a month, or the annual plan at $33 a year, for more fonts, editing options, and no advertisements.
Ease of Use: Called the “poor man’s Photoshop,” by one happy blogger, PicMonkey is a favorite among the faithful. It features an easy interface, lots of free options, and easy-to-use graphic tools. Within seconds I had an image uploaded and began tinkering, cropping, resizing, rearranging and adding text, etc.
PicMonkey Interface
Even if you want to start from scratch to create your own graphics, it may take a bit of doing but it is easily achievable. However, PicMonkey may be a little too simple. It reminds me of the decorative digs you can delve into in say Shutterfly or Walgreens Photo Book apps.
Rating: 7 points
Functionality: A lot of granular stuff that designers just know – what image size is best for print or online, glossy or canvas finish, PicMonkey takes care of it all for you.
The functionality of the app was lovely. Easy, breezy “Drag & Drop,” reverse arrows for “Undo” and “Redo,” all the scissors to represent “Cropping,” all the iconic familiarity a time-strapped content creator could want. You can do an incredible amount of operations using PicMonkey for free including:
Adjust image sizing,
Crop image
Adjust exposure
Add text
Add shadows
Add image art (you’re own or icons from their library)
Even add logos, watermarks and other icons on photos.
Rating: 8 points
Best Free Stuff: As aforementioned you get a lot for free but not a lot of imagery. And the imagery is fairly Shutterfly-ish. The text offerings are fairly robust but some are a bit cartoony for the business setting. But with a little ingenuity you can create professional looking graphics with just a few clicks. And our image we created in five minutes:
Not bad eh?
Rating: 9 points
User Control: You have all the freedom and control over this app and you’ll have no problem doing what you want to do with his app if creating simple image ads and blog post imagery is what you want to do. But if you want more sophisticated graphic design artistry, infographics, data analysis charts and so on, PicMonkey may not be the app for you.
Rating: 7 points
Total: 31 out of 40 points
Canva
Website: Canva.com
Cost: Free to use but $1 add-ons for Canva-marked images and special effects. More polished than PicMonkey, less cumbersome than Sprites, Canva is the Goldilocks of this pictorial graphic trio. It fits perfectly for marketing professionals who want a sophisticated-looking graphic without all the time and talent it takes to use Photoshop correctly.
Ease of Use: When you start an account with Canva it immediately gives you this five-image tutorial that’s a bit annoying if you’re know what you’re doing but incredibly helpful if you don’t. As this screenshot shows it automatically configures your settings and choices by what type of graphic you’re creating.
It literally has all the choices that any quick-thinking marketer would need right at your fingertips making it incredibly easy to use.
Rating: 10 points
Functionality: Once you click on those icons you can create anything you want and have the perfect dimensions. Here’s my 30-second Facebook Cover Image:
We could literally spend all day creating stuff with this app. It was so amazingly easy and professional and had so many functions.
As soon as you’ve completed your graphic Canva offers you a URL, choice of png or pdf of the image right away.
It is literally the easiest, coolest graphic to publishing interface tool that’s out there. Photoshop doesn’t even do that. Don’t have images? No problem, they have thousands available but shopping could get pricey as they charge about $1 an image. Canva also doesn’t bog you down with every font known to man or color text available instead offer you color palettes to choose from and recommended fonts for ads, graphics etc. Again this takes the guess work out of creating graphics and adds amazing functionality to the application.
Rating: 10 points
Best Free Stuff: Canva offers you free quality narrowing down it’s choices of text, overlays and effects. You can always tell when a non-designer discovers a graphics tool because they break all the design rules with three fonts per text overlay. Canva doesn’t let you wander into such dangerous tacky territory offering you limited but quality choices in fonts, color palettes and imagery.
Rating: 8 points
User Control: If you use your own photos, you have unlimited free control with Canva. If you don’t, you still have a lot of options to choose from. Again, Canva does all the thinking for you but let’s you delve into the creative instead of the technical issues of dimensions, scripting and so on. You can create amazing graphics and have them instantly available to use and reuse at your will.
Rating: 10 points
Total: 38 out of 40
Final Verdict
Just two points shy of perfect, Canva is the best graphics creation tool for professionals and amateurs alike – low barrier to entry for some amazing outputs. Their warm welcome e-mail from “Hazel, Customer Happiness,” is a nice touch so we’re giving it a 40 out of 40. Leave your horror or success stories in the comments below!
It was the tweet mocked around the world. If you’re a social media manager and you don’t know who Justine Sacco is, then listen up. Last December, Sacco, a former public relations executive from billion-dollar Internet conglomerate IAC, tweeted a tasteless joke. I say ‘former because it didn’t take long for the global brand to fire Sacco after she used less than 140 characters on Twitter to offend an entire continent and a full 90% of the world that doesn’t share her ethnicity with this infamous salvo:
Sadly Sacco has joined the ranks of Jayson Blair and Janet Cooke as examples NOT to follow if you plan on having any kind of success in your media job. Any social media manager worth her salt will know to avoid the Sacco-scaled sharing disasters of offensive, racist and unacceptable language Tweets, but there are some no-so subtle but just as damaging faux paus that social media managers have committed and that you, as a good social media manager, want to avoid. Here’s a list of 10, do not attempt or face getting fired social media no-nos:
Keep Your Personal Account, Personal
Just like poor Justine, you may think that you have a personal social media account. And maybe you tweet tasteless jokes about body parts and farts to your friends but in this biz there’s no such thing as invisible. If you use Hootsuite or any other social media tool, keep your personal account far, far away from your corporate ones. They will inevitably get confused. Just look at some of these gems…really 1-800-Flowers guy…”fyi flowers are plant vaginas…” Yeah…that got sent out on the flower delivery company’s corporate account. Ouch.
Add A Human Touch
Automation is a good thing except for when you’re trying to engage an audience. And it’s severely awkward when your brand is in crisis management mode and your Twitter stream sounds colder than HAL, that robot that destroyed everyone in 2001 A Space Odyssey. That’s what happened with Progressive Insurance after a grieving brother put them on blast for defending his sister’s alleged killer in court. They responded with a series of successive Tweets all with the same bland message.
Don\’t Ask For Likes Or Shares
It destroys your credibility and makes you seem less authentic. No one likes a phony.
It\’s Good To Be Funny, But Don\’t Be Offensive
Funny is good on social media. Not funny and offensive is bad. The difference…you’re the audience, not you. Humor is a secret weapon of social media gurus but it has to be acceptable otherwise you run the risk of alienating your customer base. Here’s an example of a good humor Tweet:
Example of bad humor this marvel of profundity from Kenneth Cole:
Assuming That Everyone Likes You
Some marketing manager wants to get in touch with the people and decide to hold an open forum. Don’t do this if you’re brand doesn’t have the loyalty of its customers. Just as J.P. Morgan decided they would let their VP take over the Twitter feed for “Q&A.” It turned out to be more like S&M with all the abuse they took from pre-questionnaires. Some favorites: “What’s it’s like working with Mexican cartels?” and “When will you all go to jail?” The session was canceled before it began.
Never Insult Your Audience
Offensive and tasteless jokes aside, nothing is worse for a social media manager to do than to serve up content that even an eight-year-old would find dumb. The big yes on social media are images, inspirational quotes, giveaways, brand engagement, hilarious hijinks, anything with cats, babies and puppies and the occasionally mean rift about any Kardashian (except Rob we love him). But seriously, stop with the dumb trivia, and goofy games. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
Play Nice In The Sandbox
Social media expert Josh Ochs’ mantra is “Light, Bright and Polite,” when it comes to tweets, status updates, pics, and other social media. No one likes a Debby Downer. Social media managers should be aware of etiquette and the rules to participating in this space. Have a bad day? Leave it off Twitter. Don’t like your competition, out sell them don’t crucify them on Facebook. Does someone follow you? Follow them back.
Share information instead because social media is a two-way street. Engage, not enrage.
Have A Social Media Strategy
The New York Times once revered for it’s hard-hitting journalism is getting pummeled in the digital age. Read the internal report about it’s digital marketing failings that includes being routinely beat on likes, shares and pageviews by its competitors such as Buzzfeed on stories actually written by New York Times staffers. How does that happen? They lack in developing a coherent strategy. At NYT, the editorial runs it’s Twitter feed, not their Facebook. In contrast, Forbes.com hired content marketers to handle their social meda. If you’re a social media manager without a strategy you’re a boat without a rudder and you’re not doing your company any good. Social media is marketing. that requires engaging, informing, delighting even, and always, always helping your customers connect with your brand through sales, partnerships and community.
One of my favorite social media sites to not only use but also write about is Twitter; a great marketing medium for brands and people who know how to use it properly. Twitter has also become a platform for engaging customers to receive feedback, positive or negative.
Let me explain the “know how to use it properly” statement a little bit more; the reason I emphasized this was to simply put, yes, anyone can get a Twitter account but that does not mean everyone should post to Twitter, especially when it comes to your business.
Businesses have taken course of all different strategies when it comes to how they market their brand on Twitter, some examples would include; creating community chats by employing hashtags, which makes the chat trackable, tweeting to gain traffic to a specific landing page or push out relevant content to create a sense of authority.
Some businesses use Twitter for the sole purpose of building relationships and giving a personality to their brand. Then you have businesses who are self promoting, ignore the community, don’t understand the science of Twitter or leave their brand in the hands of an inexperienced social media account manager who makes mistakes handling multiple accounts and ends up sending out drunk tweets…
Was @JCpenney Twitter hacked or is their tweeter drunk?
So it is time to be brutally honest and tell you why your biz is losing followers on the daily and don\’t be upset when I explain why you need to put an end to some strategies you had considered brilliant. Remember this is all for you!
1. #Enough #Of #The #Hashtags
Using too many hashtags is a pretty common mistake among the Twitter community, particularly made thinking that when potential customers or customers are searching it will help get your Tweet to pop up first. But listen close, too many hashtags make your updates difficult to read. It also shows that you\’re really not focused about the message and the conversation and this is where you will end up loosing some followers. Keep your motto for hashtag use at a maximum of three per tweet.
Still not quite sure how to break your habit of abusing the hashtag, well take a look through this website for everything you need to know about understanding the hashtag.
toomanyhashtags
2. Stop talking about yourself
I am sure you see it when you use your own social media sites, the new mom who wants you to know every time little Johnny needs a diaper change or your friend who wants to let you know how out of shape you are by constantly posting gym selfies or status updates about how much muscle they gained over the weekend, we cannot stand these people, so don’t be that guy on Twitter when representing your business.
If you spend most of your time on Twitter promoting your business, people will first ignore you and then they will \”unfollow\” you. We cannot stand the person who constantly talks about themselves on our social media so were not going to like a business that does it either, especially when you are pushing a product or service. You have to remember that Twitter is a “social” network, you must learn how to communicate and build good quality relationships without bombarding them with promotions.
Follow the 80/20 rule. Post 80% helpful or entertaining content and save 20% for the self-promotional stuff.
3. No more Mr. Roboto
Drop all the marketing- and sales-speak. One great result of social media is that it has allowed businesses and organizations to speak in a more casual voice with their fans. This means you can be funny and loose in the ways you get your messages across. Write to your fans like they’re people, not customers, clients, or donors, because that’s exactly what they are.
Twitter
4. I am waiting for a response please..
You came to Twitter to be social, so when someone goes to make contact with your company don’t leave them hanging. Whether they reach out to your company with a positive or negative response it is important to you respond to every DM or mention you receive. When your customers realize they can just shoot out a tweet to your company and get a response they are more likely to interact and acknowledge the fact to their followers that they got a response from you.
As a business owner, there are few occurrences more unwelcome than the proliferation of negative online reviews. Bad online reviews are damaging to any business owner’s ego, but they are hardly just matters of vanity.
Because so many consumers use online review sites to inform their purchasing decisions, companies beset with bad reviews can face dire consequences. This can include drop-offs in sales, increases in refund requests and ultimately a plummeting bottom line.
The good new is, there are ways in which companies can take the classy route to responding to negative reviews as also engage in damage control.
Minimizing the effect of a nasty online review requires companies to know how and when to respond to feedback. Before we go into the respectful and proper way of handling this issue let’s take a look at the very wrong ways of handling criticism
What NOT to do when you receive a bad online review:
Mistake # 1:
Deny the problem exists: when a customer has a complaint, insisting that they’re wrong in a public forum is a big mistake. Even if you are completely convinced that the problem was on their end, you should acknowledge the issue at hand.
Own up to your mistake. In some situations, blame begins to get passed around like a hot potato. During freak accidents or problems caused by outsiders, some companies look for a way to shield themselves from customer frustration.
Mistake # 2:
Argue with the reviewer: It is only natural to feel hurt or angry when someone posts negative criticism about your business. But responding in anger could cripple your reputation permanently because information stays on the internet forever. In other words, never do this.
Mistake # 3:
Do nothing: While a few negative comments are obviously the work of people who just like to say nasty things, for the most part, ignoring bad reviews is in the hopes they’ll go away is a poor strategy. It sends a message that your business doesn’t care when people have negative experiences.
What to do when you receive a bad online review:
In order to take action against negative online reviews, you have to be aware of any that exist.
It’s important to monitor your social media pages and respond to concerns there. But you should also check out major consumer review sites like Yelp to see what people are saying about your business. the simplest way to do this is to set up a Google Alert for your business name. You can use a free tracking tool like Social Mention to keep up with online reviews.
But for when you do find those less than stellar reviews:
Take an objective look: If the review or comment is obviously not serious, or if the poster is using anger and abusive language, your best option is probably to ignore it. If possible, have it removed. Most consumer review sites offer a way to flag or report reviews that violate their terms of service.
Respond with tact: When addressing a negative review, keep it professional. Passive-aggressive or sarcastic comments only fuel the flames. You can choose to respond privately (useful when you disagree with a reviewer’s take on a situation) or publicly, which helps to demonstrate to other readers that you\’re addressing the problem.
Hi all. So sorry, it looks like we\’ve been compromised. Temporarily pausing all posts as we investigate. We’ll update ASAP.
Apologize and ask for input: Most often, the best response to an upset customer is to say you’re sorry without actually qualifying the apology to redirect the blame toward the reviewer\’s feelings. Admit that a mistake was made and ask what you can do to resolve the situation.
Most importantly, keep it consistent. When you actively respond to negative online feedback about your business, other potential customers can see that you are engaged and that you care about your customers.
With a consistent response policy, you can turn a bad online review into a positive outlook for your business.
