How to Boost Customer Loyalty through Social Media
Improving customer loyalty has a solid business case behind it since it is cheaper to retain a repeat customer than seek new customers. One of the cheapest ways to engage your customer base and boost customer loyalty is through social media.
Have a Social Media Strategy
This isn’t obvious, given how many organizations set up social media pages and then haphazardly update their statuses or post marketing content occasionally. Your company needs to have a social media strategy, even if this is only sharing content marketing of value to your customers periodically. You need to define a clear brand identity and ensure that your communications and efforts reflect that identity.
Engage with Social Media Followers Socially
Social media is an interesting hybrid of personal one to one connections and mass communications. Social media allows companies to receive comments, compliments, questions, and complaints online. Your company’s social media plan needs to include conversing with your social media followers. You cannot just send out content marketing.
You need to answer follower questions so that they feel like their needs are being met. Your company should thank people for their compliments so that they continue the word of mouth marketing; sharing their praise while giving them credit for it can make them loyal volunteer marketers. It is also essential to respond to complaints since failing to address them suggests to followers that you don’t care.
Reward Repeat Customers Who Join Social Media
You can increase social media engagement with your customers by encouraging them to sign up to follow you on social media. A few ways to encourage them to do so include putting social media buttons in customer service emails with calls to action to follow you on social media and reward those who share your content on social media with coupon codes or recognition. If you complete an online MBA program from Washington State University, you’ll learn the best strategies for generating repeat business and methods to reach out to those who used to buy from you but stopped doing so.
Create a Community
Creating a community among your social media followers builds brand loyalty in a way that nothing else can since it creates a social connection between followers and connects the company with their personal identities. Those earning a masters in business administration program should learn how to cultivate community through exclusive content, incentivizing interactions between customers on social media and rewarding those who bring in more followers. Simple steps would be recognition of those who share user generated content with the community, rewarding volunteer moderators, and thanking those who answer others’ questions.
Conclusion
Have a clear social media and image you want to project. Share content that your customers value and ask your customers to follow you on social media. Maintain the connection by interaction with them by answering questions and responding to complaints and deepen the connection and generate social media buzz by rewarding social media followers. Encourage customers to interact with each other and cultivate community.
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