Using Social Media to Engage Your Customers

So you have a Facebook page and a twitter account but are you using them to their full advantage? What am I talking about? Well are you just shouting out updates or are you using social media to create conversation.

Most of what I see is the former. Yes, your updates are giving information and helping to spread your name but are your followers responding back. Oh I don’t mean when you post what you are having for dinner do the all post back “yummy.” that’s not a conversation.

Would you like an example? Take a look at The Loft.

Loft posted this “LOFT We love color at LOFT. Tell us your favorite way to wear color in the comments.” and got 59 comments.

You know what, when they start buying the next season they know exactly what you want. Dang, that’s helpful.

Something else they are doing is letting their employees post. There are updates,and more importantly answers to questions from stores all over the country.

How about their “Loft Loves Teachers” program. If you sign up to Like the program, you get 15% off. Educators get discounts every day. Way to appeal to your target market.
The customers at the Loft may not all be teachers but a darn high percentage are moms and of course they support teachers.

Now let’s apply these things to us.

DJ’s, instead of putting in a list of fav first dance songs you could ask what your ‘friends’ are using or “What is the worst song you have ever heard played at a wedding?”

You could post a music video and ask for opinions on when best to play it at a wedding, even put in a poll.

Bridal salons. Easy, post a dress pic and ask for opinions. Love it, hate it, how would you change it?

Run a favorite LBD post. Put of a small gallery of maybe 5 little black dresses and get your ‘friends’ to vote on their fav.

Florist, ask what is the hardest part of planning your décor. Or ask everyone to post their colors for their wedding. Run a Favorite Flower poll. Post a small gallery of 5 flowers and have for their favorite.

Planners, There are a million questions you could ask. You may also want to throw out some random scenarios just to see what bride say. Things like”Your best friend has turned into Maidzilla, how should you handle it?’ Asking them will give you a real insight into how your target market really thinks.

Photographers, ask brides to post their favorite pictures that they have found online. Once you know what they love, you have a better idea of what to put in your portfolio. Change it up every week and ask for say, a cake shot one week and an engagement shot the next. Keep it active.

Now I know some of you are going to go out there, do it once, not get a response and call it a failure. WRONG Campaigns like this take a while to catch on. One of your questions will hit a nerve one day and then it will take off. Your ‘friends’ will backtrack and start responding to the previous questions and start coming back to look for new ones. So you have to keep at it.

Once it starts to work you get the benefit of more visitors and brand recognition AND you have begun to successfully pick the brain of your potential clients. Yaha!! Giant double score. How much easier would it be to market to someone if you already knew what they were thinking.

It is not enough to just be in social media, it’s time to learn how to really use it.