Social media can help you grow customer loyalty, but only if your content is actually useful to your customers
The loyal fan – dedicated, passionate and sometimes nearly evangelical – is one that every company and brand dreams of. While excellent and innovative products and stellar customer service are key requirements to building a loyal fan base, social-media marketing can help nurture and strengthen budding customer relationships.
Here are some tips to help you create social media content that can help turn casual followers into loyal and dedicated customers.
1. Interact
It’s much easier for customers to feel loyal when they feel they are cared about in return. Simply acknowledging their presence and inviting them to be part of a two-sided conversation builds engagement. Posing questions to your followers allows them to share their lives with you and feel involved and helpful by providing feedback to your company. By interacting with your followers, you elevate their status from silent receivers of your information to important partners in a relationship, building connection and loyalty.
2. Be helpful
Posting content about your company and products or services is helpful in keeping your followers informed, but it doesn’t do much to build a relationship that fosters loyalty. When your social-media content includes information that is helpful to your followers in some way - such as how-to guides, tips and tricks, and educational infographics – you help your followers view you as someone who is interested in benefiting their customers’ lives in some way. After all, people are more likely to feel loyal to a give-and-take relationship than one that simply takes.
Shama Kabani is CEO of The Marketing Zen Group, a social media and digital PR firm based in Dallas and servicing clients all over the globe. Her best-selling book, The Zen of Social Media Marketing has just been published in an updated 2nd Edition. Her "Ask Shama" column appears regularly on Upstart Business Journal.
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