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5 Tips to Connect with Customers Online with Hootsuite (Guest Blog)

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Everyone is talking about how social media can help your business, but how exactly does that work? If you look at Twitter, that fast-paced real-time social network, the volume of information you are presented with could easily confuse you. So how can you master the chaos and make this work for you? A social relationship platform will help. Here are 5 tips that will help you connect with your customers online with Hootsuite.

1. Build Relationships

Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn offer oceans of opportunity for businesses in every industry, whether B2C or B2B. They can help you to find potential customers and connect with them online. To build relationships, you first need to find your (potential) customers:

  • Set up search streams and keyword searches to find potential customers
  • As a local business set up geo-coded search streams to see what conversations happen around you
  • Listen to what your potential customers are talking about and engage in those conversations
  • Invest time in these relationships by continuing the conversation

In social media, quality is more valuable than quantity, so choose to follow people that you can build relationships with. For example, if someone follows you, only follow them back if they are relevant to your business.

2. Localise

Localisation is a term we keep hearing and its importance cannot be stressed enough. Make your content count for your local audience. If you run a local business, it may not be of benefit to attract people who are geographically out of your reach. To go about this, take a look at your geo-coded streams and use the local hashtags that you discover there. You can also add a location to your posts using Hootsuite’s “Add location” feature. This will help people searching for local content to easily discover your posts.

   (searching for keyword “hootsuite” in central London within a radius of 25km)

3. Monitoring & Engagement

Proactive monitoring and engagement is key to a solid social media strategy. Your audience will more than likely not automatically come to you and ask for business. By actively monitoring and listening to your social media channels and you will be able to:

  • Track brand mentions, competitors, key industry terms and relative keywords
  • Identify opportunities as they happen so you can respond in real time
  • Turn customers into advocates by engaging with them and resolving their issues or questions.

Don’t be shy to join a conversation or respond to questions that you feel you can provide valuable answers to. Through this you will gain actionable insights into what is being said about you on social media. And to stay ahead of the curve, monitoring the social presence of your competitors is key, and might also give you some inspiration.

   (Monitoring brand mentions and direct mentions on Twitter) 

4. Save time to improve customer care

Social media can be time-consuming, especially when you just jump into it, rather than using a strategic approach. Make sure you have a cohesive social strategy in place and when you spend time on your business’ social media, keep the following tips in mind:

  • Quickly share interesting and relevant content (use the auto-schedule feature, if you are not using a content calendar)
  • Curate content: Search different blogs and sites to find content that is useful to your audience
  • Syndicate a content library with engaging content and re-use where appropriate
  • Plan ahead: What holidays, special events, tradeshows, etc. are coming up?

5. Teamwork Makes the Dream Work

I often hear that social media is difficult to manage when you cannot have a dedicated person managing it 24/7. When looking at the big brand’s social media accounts I would clearly get the same impression. As a small business however you will most likely not be receiving hundreds of mentions per day to deal with. Whether you are running a high street shop, restaurant or agency the Hootsuite Teams functionality in Hootsuite Pro makes it easy to support, collaborate, and share social media with your employees and colleagues.

You can keep social profiles secure and customise permission levels so you can review and approve content before it is published, this way you can collaboratively:

  • Share information
  • Be prepared for any kind of situation
  • Assign messages to team members
  • Secure your channels.

So when connecting with your customers online, it is not only important to respect the 2-way aspect of building relationships, but to also create relevance when talking to them. We all like getting some attention and by tailoring your content to your audience’s needs, you already made a big step forward. A social relationship platform like Hootsuite will not do the job for you, but it will make it easier for you. Start your 30-day free trial here.

 

Author: Paul Sackmann, Community Coordinator, EMEA, Hootsuite. @paulsackmann