Social media marketing isn’t just about looking for and identifying smart ways to motivate and keep your audience engaged. Sure, that’s an essential aspect, but it is also about pre-empting their needs or being in their faces as frequently and as unobtrusively as possible.
We all know that the best defense is a good offense. So, to get the best results from your social media campaigns this year, you need to start listening and looking out for certain conversations.
Find Your Brand Evangelists and Influencers
These are the first people whose conversations you listen to. You know how you latch on to every word that comes out of an expert’s mouth? That’s what you need to do here. Tweeting or posting a status update and having people talking about it in minutes is fine.
But, there are major influencers and advocates who play a key role in promoting and talking about your brand, products and services. These are people who have an active audience, are willing to spread the word about your brand and are most importantly, willing to tolerate your occasional mistakes.
These people are like your online family. Seek them out and bond with them this year. If you live in the same town, connect with them, have coffee, brunch or whatever you think seems fine.
Locate Brand Haters and Antagonists
We don’t like these people but they exist and you have to do something about them. Someone once said “if you don’t have antagonists, then you’re not doing something right” or something like that. So, expect to have people like that particularly when you’re successful.
They’ll often present as watchdogs, trolls, unsatisfied customers and outright antagonists that you just can’t please no matter what. Listen to their conversations and see what they’re saying about your brand and industry.
You don’t have to engage with them if you don’t want to. But, you can listen to their chatter and watch out for possible crises and major issues, sticking points and huge pains that your brand isn’t addressing, and most importantly, decide whether to address these issues or not.
Keep Track of Industry/Brand News Items and Specific Brand Mentions
Thanks to a few tools like Google Alerts, Radian 6 and Hootsuite, listening to conversations and identifying your audience has become incredibly easy.
You don’t have to be a newshound to monitor what’s going on in your industry and see where and what discussions people are having about your business. At the very least, make sure to check your alerts every day. Simply skimming through the mails and locating the most important ones is enough.
Watch out for news items regarding your niche and industry and use that to your advantage. If you get in front of the wave on time, you can ride that trend pretty well and that can do a whole lot of good for your business.
Watch Out for Industry Wide Expertise and Audience Migration
Be on the lookout for opportunities where you can share your knowledge within the industry and become a resource person. These could present as opportunities to write for a major blog in your industry, create a resource video or even speak at an event.
The more you show up at these locations or events, the better the results you can expect in terms of brand and personality exposure. You might also want to start taking note of newer social platforms that your audience is migrating to. Lately, platforms like Vine, Snapchat, Keek and Path have been in the news. Get there first and establish your presence before they become inundated with ads and marketers.
Wonderful post on essential rudiments to consider in social media conversations, Oscar K! Seeing how the whole point of getting a brand known is to know the targeted audience, those take more priority. And as a supplement towards that, having a slightly generalized audience helps as well in getting your product and service known to more potential clients.
And being able to take the experiential learning from industry companies and adding your own twist for your own personal service helps a lot as well. And it’s important for others to be engaged with their social media contacts in order to gain reliability and credibility. Thanks for the post on these important concepts, and I look forward into researching more from you!
This is a comprehensive write up and very informative. Thanks for sharing.
I hope all florists will see this post and act accordingly. It is for their benefit. Thanks for sharing.
Totally, 100%. The world and all of its sub-populations and cultures are ALWAYS changing and it’s important to adapt to that change. Without adapting to change, you’ll rarely attract anyone new. and I’m sure nobody wants that.
I’ve always thought that I should just disregard brand haters and antagonists, and I never actually thought about addressing the issues that my brand has with them. I could probably take some online surveys to see what people don’t like about my business so I can start addressing them right away in order to increase my market share.
Thanks for this post! It was really awesome advice.
Wow, I really like the idea of using haters/trolls as a tool to pinpoint ways that my business might be improved. I don’t have any at the moment, perhaps I’m not successful enough yet, but when I do I will definitely be doing this. Thanks for the great advice!
I totally agree with pampering your best followers since they are the ones that spread your brand and your links all over the place. They also beat any personal effort since a natural spread of your brand is always better than an artificial one.
About the haters, just be careful. Some are simply trolls while some do have genuine complaints that should be taken in consideration. Still, fine tuning of our florist blogs or stock can be made by following the conversations of naysayers.
Excellent information, although I wanted to comment on something said in the article. While it is true that you’ll have antagonists and “haters” when you are successful, this doesn’t mean that this should be your aim. If anything, your aim should be the least amount of antagonists, because they can go as far as talking negatively about your product!