How Small Businesses Can Leverage Social Media to Attract Loyal Customers

A recent survey by American Express OPEN found that 82% of small businesses in the United States are relying on word of mouth to acquire loyal customers and 44% of those surveyed currently use social media to help attract loyal customers. These findings leave little room to doubt that social media has come of age. The question for small businesses is no longer if or when to get active, but how to best leverage time and resources to get the most of their efforts.

Step One: Establish Goals and Create a Plan
Don’t get fooled, even the most shining and seemingly natural examples of social media execution are meticulously designed. Unless the brand happens to already be well known, nothing will happen by accident or chance. Sit down and establish goals as early on as possible. Have an open discussion with everyone involved to find out what you’re trying to accomplish. Is social media a means of customer service? Do you want to drive traffic to a website? Is PR important? Define what success looks like. Once there is a clear picture of the end goal, the team can move on to creating an action plan. The plan may include setting up new social networking accounts, re-establishing stale channels, and defining responsibilities amongst employees.

Step Two: Get Active and Start Experimenting
It’s a big mistake to assume that social media is a “build it and they will come” type of endeavor. Yes consumers want to have a relationship with the places (both on and offline) that they do business with, but even the most loyal of customers need some guidance. It’s a shame when business owners get excited about social media and enthusiastically create branded Facebook , YouTube, and Twitter channels, only to fail in taking the extra step need to promote all the work that has been done.

Some ideas to get the ball rolling:
•Optimize a website to encourage social sharing amongst visitors
•Integrate social media into an email marketing campaign
•Take advantage of in-store display advertising
•Place social icons EVERYWHERE (online and offline )
•Consider investing in Facebook and YouTube ads

Step Three: Drive Loyalty
Once a foundation for success has been built, it’s time to get creative and get in the trenches of the social web. This is where most of the heavy lifting is done.

Let’s focus on a couple of specific areas:

Outreach

Every brand, regardless of size or industry, has a community around it. In simple terms, these are the potential customers who fit a businesses targeted demographic. It’s imperative to find out where these people congregate online and what type of discussions they’re having. The ultimate goal is to become a part of the community and build up brand advocates.

Here are some good starting places:
•Google Blog Search and Technorati
•Icrerocket and Socialmention
•Online forums
•Search.twitter and YouTube
•Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Digg

When reaching out it’s crucial to remember that social media isn’t at all like traditional advertising. The goal isn’t to pound potential customers with an advertising message or a sales pitch. It happens all too often and it simply doesn’t work. Conversations that aren’t authentic are easy to pick out and can instantly hurt a brand’s reputation. It’s surprising to see that many businesses, both large and small, end up failing in this department. Stay helpful, stay sincere, and think twice about doing anything that might be considered spam.

Promotions

Customers are motivated by incentives. Give customers a reason to connect online and they will. Facebook deals, Foursquare specials, Tweet incentives, and online coupons fall into this category. One example would be setting up a contest where customers take part by taking photos (somehow related to the business) and then posting them on the businesses Facebook page.

Customer Service

A surefire way to turn short term customers into lifelong customers is to deliver outstanding customer service. Use social media to take advantage by monitoring conversations and jumping in when an opportunity to help or say thank you arises.

Step Four: Track Progress and Adopt Best Practices
Without tracking activity it’s difficult/near impossible to know if the business is moving towards the goals that it originally established. This can be as simple as keeping a record of metrics such as fans, followers, subscribers, traffic, direct sales, etc… to determine if progress is being made. After a period of several months it becomes easier to determine what works best and the business can begin to adopt best practices. It’s an ongoing process, but by following a predetermined plan over a span of time it becomes progressively easier to win over and keep loyal customers.

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When to Retweet for best results

TweetWhen , we had to check it out. If you ever wondered when your tweets had the biggest impact, this site attempts to show you just that.

Sample report courtesy TweetWhen

You simply enter your Twitter username (if you are a protected Twitter stream you will not be able to use the service) and an optional email address. I checked to see why they ask for the email address optionally and no clue is given. I presume for a mailing list.

It will then grab your last 1000 tweets to analyze. Smartly it also says to register for an upcoming webinar while you wait. Great marketing move. As for myself I was told that Monday’s at 10am is my best time. There is a link to tweet that out, of course.

Measuring Social Media Effectiveness & Engagement

Using social media effectively, specifically for business, is not merely a popularity game – at least not anymore. At first, that was how we (business owners, marketers, communicators, etc.) measured the effectiveness of our efforts on sites like Twitter, Facebook and the like.

These days are gone – or they should be. No more “spray and pray”. No more throwing information, media like photos and video out on the Web and *hoping* someone looks at it, like your target audience.
Testing and measuring are all part of evaluating the effectiveness of a program. This goes for marketing, communications or public relations, advertising, etc. So why would we not do it with social media? If we aren’t tracking engagement or online interactions, sharing, retweeting, etc. how can we really know what’s going on with our brands online, our consumers online, etc.? We can’t.

If you aren’t tracking or monitoring your online engagement yet, start now.

Having trouble convincing your boss this is a valid path to take in communicating on behalf of the company? Track your efforts for 30 days and present it to them. Numbers, data and trends don’t lie. You can do this.

There are a myriad of tools available to help track what’s happening on your/your business’ social network. Some of them can be quite pricey and are generally set up for larger organizations. Don’t be discouraged though! You can do this on your own, without the cost.

We don’t just want to measure how many fans or followers we have, but what we are doing with them. It doesn’t matter if your company Facebook page has 2,000 “likes” or “fans”, if none of them are commenting, liking, posting or sharing with you. They could have hidden the page from their stream or just tuned out. By measuring you’ll know!

All you need is Excel and some of the backend data readily available as admins on your various social media accounts. Set up the spreadsheet with the far left column as the account platforms. Starting from top to bottom you’ll list them all – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Digg, Vimeo, LinkedIn, etc. You can even include the company blog if you have access to that.

Then, across the top row you’ll plug in your measurement categories. These should include some or all of these, or at least a close variation:
- Audience (This is fans, followers, subscribers, readers, etc. depending on the platform)
- Activity (This is what YOU’VE done – posts, comments, uploads, etc. during the given measurement timeframe)
- Engagement (Here’s where we start getting some real information – user comments, likes, linkbacks, shares, conversations or DMs on Twitter, mentions, RTs, etc.)
- Web Traffic (Available from your site tracking system – think Google Analytics – How many visitors to your Website came from each platform?)
- Lead Generation (What the bosses care about. Connect with your sales team or incoming call coordinator to start tracking where customers come from. DON’T accept “internet” – ask them to be more specific as to which page, if possible.)

Armed with information, you can now make decisions as to which platforms works best for your company, what areas might need improvement or where they may be an opportunity.

Start tracking, testing and measuring today. Your effectiveness is guaranteed to improve.