Social media is a powerful tool that enables businesses to create more meaningful relationships with their customers. Different social media platforms are more or less popular with different age groups. It is therefore crucial for a business to build a strong presence on the social media platform that is most popular with their intended target audience and most loyal customers.
Which Social Media Platform Should You Use To Reach Your Target Audience?
If the product or service your business provides is popular with people over the age of 40 than Facebook is the platform you need to be posting on. When trying to appeal to young adults aged between 18 and 40 Instagram is the best platform to communicate with this age group. TikTok and Snapchat are the best platforms to reach high school students or the teen market.
Different platforms are used for different purposes. Instagram is best used for photo and video content. When posting a photo on Instagram it is important to include a well written caption and to include hashtags that are relevant to your businesses products and the people who consume them. Instagram Stories is also a great feature to use in order to give your followers a behind the scenes look at what your business consists of on a daily basis.
Facebook is great for posting status updates, sharing news articles and also event planning. Event pages on Facebook can be created to invite people to attend events that are run by or associated with your business. You can keep track of how many people are interested in attending and pay money to advertise your event to reach a larger audience.
The Benefits of Using Social Media to Communicate With Your Customers
By using social media to tell a captivating story you humanise your business and sound less desperate to make a sale. Businesses should aspire to use social media with the intention of building an online community that is passionate about the products you sell. The best way to entice your customers to purchase your product through social media is to create a call to action by posting content that either is humorous, educational, entertaining or evokes strong emotion. It is important to share content that adds value to your customers life and most importantly entices your social media followers to join the conversation around your products by leaving comments and sharing your content with their friends.
It has been reported that customers are 64% more likely to trust a brand if it interacts positively on social media. Social media provides customers who have a negative experience with a business to post about it online. Having negative comments associated with your business posted on social media has a huge potential to deter customers from deciding to purchase your products. However, if your business responds promptly and professionally to any negative feedback you receive, then you have an opportunity to re-frame a negative situation and offer a solution to enhance the customers experience if and when they decide to do business with you again. By receiving feedback online this can also give a business an opportunity to improve their relationship with their customers and make necessary changes to enhance their customers experience in the future.
More Powerful Ways A Business Can Communicate With Their Customers Online
On top of using social media platforms to engage in conversation with customers it is also important to have a website that can serve as a base that links all of the business’s social media platforms together. To give your business social-proof it is also a great idea to include testimonies on your website written by satisfied customers. Websites can also include a blog section where an employee from your company can post feature articles about topics relating to different trends and topics that are currently occurring with the industry of which the business operates in.
It is also a good idea for your business to keep a database with the email addresses of all your customers and send out a newsletter on a monthly, weekly or fortnightly basis depending on the nature of your business. Sending a personalised email to your customer especially on milestone dates such as their birthday and offering a discount on you service or product is a great way to maintain and re-attract customers via email.