Do You Know Me?
– by Bill Nolan
Here’s a question… how many of you pay attention to the fans and followers on your business’ social media accounts? Do you actually get to know these followers to understand what their interests are and why they decided to follow you? Would you even notice if Bill Gates started to follow you? Or, are you just going through the motions and crunching numbers?
Many business’ lose track of why they first started promotions on social media. Likes and followers are only statistics. REMINDER, the reason you’re here is to secure current customers, attract potential clients and make your business successful. This is why understanding who your followers are and what made them follow you in the first place is so important! If you’re not taking a closer look you may be oblivious to the real reason your products and services are appealing to them. You are probably misunderstanding an entire audience that you never even realized you had or could have. Taking the time to understand these fine details will only help you in the long run with targeting posts, communications, promotions, ads and more.
Another crucial aspect many business’ fail to realize is that their own activity, or lack thereof, is possibly having a negative impact on their business. It might be making followers feel neglected. I work ample time in daily for studying the habits of successful and not so successful social media business accounts. There seems to be a common trend in the lack of knowledge and interaction with followers. Just making posts. This is true with some of the big dogs’ too. When your followers like, share, or mention your business, then it should be common courtesy to thank, recognize and possibly mention them too. INTERACT. I know, it’s such a burden, right? I mean, who really notices or cares? Well, your followers do. Obviously, those of you who read my blogs know when I’m being a smart-ass, but in this case the hard truth is that you are making followers feel… well, feel like a statistic.
Followers are not stats.
As connected as everyone is these days there are no reasons why a successful business can’t take a few seconds to leave a quick reply, acknowledgment or try to promote interaction. Lack of engagement can be a sure fire way to turn them against you. In case you haven’t noticed, negative posts about businesses are more frequent, easy and can spread like wildfire across social media networks. Before you know it, you’re getting curb stomped by enemies you never even knew you had.
Let’s get back to the most important basics of connecting with your audience, understanding why they should follow you and really what makes your business’ social media platforms work:
- • Do research within your niche market on the trends of your audience, where to find them, what they want to experience and how to lead them to the goal.
- • Analyze what works and does not work with other similar niche businesses and also with other businesses in general.
- • Pay attention to the various analytics tools that are available to your business. As you begin to understand what the stats really mean, they will give you priceless details about what is working and not working on your platforms.
- • Stop plugging in ads and just watching the numbers grow. Those may be the only numbers that grow… besides your advertising budget. Do you even know what your ROI is?
- • Subscribe to apps and receive notifications about activity on your accounts, and receive the latest updates on what is new within social platforms… and how to make them better work for your business.
- • Possibly hire a social media manager!
As I mentioned earlier, with all of the technology that is available, there is no reason your business shouldn’t experience successful social media returns, and enjoy followers that appreciate being connected with you. In the end, all of this leads to a pumped up ROI which should be your business’ ultimate goal.