“Engage local audiences” is a popular term especially when social media is involved. However, the tricky question is how to engage in social media? It is important to note that every business is different, and thus there is no step by step way to follow to achieve results. There are a few tips business people should know and when they are combined with common sense and intuition, they can help a business gain traction and generate a sizeable local audience. The bottom line is to help your brand gain value and interests which is then translated to more sales. The following tips will help you get started.
What does your local audiences want? Find out what they are saying on the comments?
Be sure to read all the comments on your Facebook page or Tweets tweeted to your Twitter page. From the direction of the comments, you can setup a hashtag or keyword monitoring stream to find out what people think about you, the competitors and the industry in general. The idea is to get incredible insight from the varied demographics of the target local customers including their thinking and feeling. The benefit is to create opportunities for improving the engagement with your local audiences.
Ask questions to start conversations
One way of engaging with your local customers is through asking thoughtful questions. Questions have to be good, real and those that you really need answers for. There is no standard for a good question because they depend on the type of business. Tips to remember is to always keep them open-ended, relevant to your business, positive, and appealing. From the questions, your may get all the varied responses from the local audiences. Some may talk about how good the product is, some may criticize it, some may compare it with competitor offers and others may suggest improvements on the product. All these comments should be your source of intelligence and knowledge on your future decisions.
Answer questions from audiences to start conversation
Questions are not always one sided, local audience sometimes ask you questions on social media. The best way to engage with your online customers is to address the questions even if you don’t have the actual answers for the questions. Answering questions means to the local audiences that you pay attention to their questions and comments. You can also answer tweeted questions by local audiences about your industry on your Twitter page.
Embrace criticisms
If businesses operated in a perfect world, everything said about your brand or business would be expected to be positive. With the today’s world of high competition in almost every product, customers will criticize you and sometimes complain of the service offered to them. This can be a source of engagement between you and the client. To you, every complaint and comment should be a great opportunity to fix issues customers may have about the product or service. The best way to do it is publicly or at very least show empathy to the complainant.
Make sure you are easy to find and follow
It is important to ensure that all social media platforms you engage with your client are visible on your websites. Your local audiences must find it easy to find the Facebook, Twitter and other social media icons on your site. This is a great step to ensure local audiences or customers can easily ‘like’ or ‘follow’ you or reach out you for any questions or queries. For example, real estate business owners should make sure that their real estate license courses websites have Facebook, Twitter and other social media icons where visitors can click to follow or ask questions about courses offered.
from Darlene Milligan http://ift.tt/20enHkh via transformational marketing
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1Ppb80p
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