Summary: To build a brand (personal or company) that can sustain the wrath of time, you need to engage with your audience and peers on social media. You need to be authentic, honest, and able to pivot at a moment’s notice in order to satisfy your customer’s needs.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Key Points
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Your existing customers and potential customers want to engage with you online, be there to engage with them.
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Let your authentic self FREE to share and engage with people, don’t hold back.
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Focus on open-ended questions and answers, seek feedback to keep the conversation going.
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Build trust and reliability.

 

We all know that companies that learned early on how to engage customers on social media have been able to build their brands to the next level with very little cost.

Those that leveraged social media marketing has gone from a single employee grinding away from a bedroom or a garage to hundreds of employees working from multi-million dollar facilities.

Brands like WordPress, MailChimp, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, SumoMe and many more…have effectively leveraged social media to build their empires.

The question is, how can you do the same for your brand? How can you leverage these platforms to build your company and scale it to make millions of dollars annually?

How can you learn how to engage customers on social media to build a company with a strong foundation and long-term growth potential?

The answer is simple, learn how to engage customers on social media in the most authentic and genuine way possible. To help you get there, here are 9 ways your company can engage with customers on social media.

1. Reply to EVERY Comment

Just because you hit “publish” on your article, it doesn’t mean that your work is done. In fact, your work has just begun. You need to reply to every comment left on your blog, thanking your visitor for their opinion and providing feedback.

You need to reply to every comment left on your blog, thanking your visitor for their opinion and providing feedback.

John Paul Aguiar - The Money Dummy Blog
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A few years ago I connected with an awesome guy, his name is John Paul Aguiar and he runs the Money Dummy Blog.

John had a tremendous impact on what I do today, and it all started because I left a simple comment on his blog.

Not only did I had the pleasure to speak with him on the phone for about 30 minutes, but he also gave me a shout out on his Twitter account.

We all want to feel appreciated, and show our visitors we care by engaging with them in a conversation. This simple gesture will help you create loyal followers, and it will help you propel your business to the next level.

2. Like and Retweet

Social media moves fast, maybe you can’t respond to everyone, but it only takes a second to give a like on Facebook or retweet on Twitter, and it makes the other person appreciate you all the more.

A few weeks ago I came across an article that John had written on LinkedIn, I simply “liked” the article, and not even an hour later, I received a notification that John had said, “thank you”.

Now, for someone that has thousands of connections on LinkedIn and was voted by Forbes Magazine in 2013 as the 9th most influential person in social media, John demonstrates over and over that he truly believes about building relationships.

3. Don’t Tell – Just tease

Next time you post a new article or blog post, don’t tell all.

Instead, simply post a teaser that gets your readers wondering what the post is about.

Sometimes you need to give your readers just enough to spark their interest and get them to click. If you wrote an article for your blog and you want to share it on social media, be sure to use powerful headlines that will entice your followers to click on the link for your website.

Remember: The better the tease, the more clicks you’ll get.

4. Use Humor On Social Media Updates

We all love to laugh, it can’t all be work and no play!

Mr. Bean - Using humor for content marketing
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In marketing, humor helps by lowering your readers’ defenses, is like an unexpected right hook and they can’t resist but to laugh.

Scour the web for funny pictures to share on your social media account.

Then ask your followers for funny captions, be sure to thank them for their comments.

Larry Kim, Founder of WordStream.com, says that comedy helps your content be memorable, even if your content is dry and boring, humor can help your readers consume your content.

Admit it: This Mr. Bean photo is disturbing!

😆

5. Solicit Feedback For Discounts

Who doesn’t want free stuff, I know I do! Offer your customers discounts to purchase your product or service in exchange for feedback.

For example, share on your social media channels a link to a quick survey in exchange for a discount on the purchase of your product or service.

Not only will you increase your sales, but if you craft it carefully, you could have greater insight into what your customers really want.

Suppose that you’re thinking about launching a new product line, asking your customers for feedback on whether they will like the idea, buy it, or not, will help you decide whether you should forget about it and move on or launch it.

6. Ask For Their Opinion

iphone-vs-samsung
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Let’s say your company manufactures cell phone cases, and you’re deciding whether to create next an iPhone or a Samsung case.

How would you know which one of your customers is most likely to buy?

By asking them to choose which one they would buy.

Not only will it help you decide which case to manufacture next, but it could give you an idea as to home many customers would most likely buy from you when is ready for sale.

7. Use High-Quality Images

We live in a very visual world, and it holds even more weight on social media.

Ask yourself, “do you read every single update on your feed? Do images catch your attention more than a bunch of words put together?”

Odds are you’re just like the rest of the people that use social media, visual elements catch our attention a lot more than a bunch of words.

To create great-looking images, use tools such as Canva or Pixlr to edit your images and create amazing graphics to share on social media.

Canva for example, they have pre-designed templates of different sizes to meet the requirements of the different social media platforms available.

If you need to find free high-quality images, check out portals such as Pixabay, or check out this list of 20 websites to find free high-quality images to use on your business.

8. Share Case Studies

case-studies
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Case studies are an excellent way to show a prospective customer about how your existing customers are using your products and services and their results.

To write a case study, you don’t need elaborate metrics and analysis, by simply focusing on a few features and how your existing customers are using them is good enough.

Use visual social media platforms to promote case studies in order to drive traffic to your website.

If your case study is about how your customer managed to save “X” number of dollars or how your product or service helped them save “X” number of hours daily, your prospective customer will be so intrigued that they will not have any option but to click on the link to find out more.

9. Balance Your Content Types

If you update your social media channels with the same type of content all the time, your followers will start to ignore your updates and just continue to scroll to the next one.

To make your social media feeds more engaging, share your updates in different formats.

Play around with photos, videos, quotes, ask questions, share links, and track those updates to find out which content types work better in terms of creating engagement.

After you have experimented with a few different content types, try running again the top-performing content types to improve your overall engagement level.

Remember, ask your readers to share their thoughts and to share your article on their social media networks, be sure to thank them for their input.

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