How to build a relationship between brand and consumers through social networks
Social media marketing is one of the most important marketing activities for every company; online communications, indeed, allow a direct contact not only with own consumers, but also with potential ones. In addition, if you implement good online community management, you can easily achieve the goals of developing engagement and creating value.
Managing a community
If you think about social networks managed by companies, you are thinking mainly about commercial and product promotion purposes. Actually, the social media offer far more possibilities: promotion is closely linked to communication with consumers, who share, evaluate and select information autonomously. Thanks to the visibility and the two-way communication offered by the platforms, the consumer has more power in front of the brand now, as his voice is stronger and ideally can reach anyone. Social media marketing strategies must therefore be aimed at improving the brand’s relationship with the customer. In a world where the flow of information has become transversal, there’s the need to change the approach and to consider social media as a channel of direct interaction with clients, a mean to converse with them, get to know them better and stay closer.
How to find the right social media?
Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tik Tok, … how to find your way? From a general strategic point of view, the more you are present on different social networks, the more you have visibility and a way to get in touch with different consumers. However, you have to pay attention to your target audience type and consequently favour the most frequented socials. It is in fact clear that if you are targeting a young target, you have to turn on Instagram, while if the target market to which we want to direct communication is in adulthood you can communicate on Facebook. Finally, LinkedIn is a social that all companies should take full advantage of to make themselves better known. In the last two years it has made a stratospheric leap in the number of subscribers, and it is clare how it has gone from being a portal used mainly to look for work to a real window on the world, through which all companies can tell their story, their values, their mission and vision and present their initiatives.
Create a bond with your community
Some aspects of social media management are extremely important to build an optimal relationship with one’s target audience, especially by exploiting the direct communication offered by social media.
- Humanize your brand: build a personality around the brand, decide who you are, what you want to communicate and above all in what way.
- Give (almost) immediate answers: being active on social media means not only posting content, but also caring on customers if they ask you questions.
- Turn your customers into ambassadors of your brand: identify your most loyal customers and thank them, interact with them, make them speak well of your products to your audience too; this will generate positive word of mouth that will lead other customers to buy your products.
- Chatbots: don’t have time to manually respond to all your customers’ requests? These intelligent chat systems are able to understand the meaning of human language, evaluate it and contextualize it in order to manage real conversations and improve customer service.
- Handle complaints better: when a customer makes a negative comment or complaint in public about social media, you need to respond promptly so that other users can see how the company intervenes to solve a problem.