The Social Media Puzzle: Piece #2 How can you use social media to build customer loyalty?

 Here are five ways you can use social media to build customer loyalty:

1. Improve your product or service by listening to negative sentiment or suggestions posted on all relevant social media channels. People who say negative things or post about you will mostly have something valid to say. Why not listen to them, examine their issue, and fix them as soon as possible? A responsive firm fixes things. Most customers are aware that some things take time to fix too. As long as they know something is genuinely being done many people will accept the situation until then.
2. Ask people to recommend or retweet or re post something from you. People talk about "net promoter scores" as a key metric for understanding customer loyalty, but the percentage who are willing to take action to recommend or retweet should be a more reliable figure, as it’s not about stating your intentions, it’s about actions. You may say you will promote a service, but not actually do it. I suggest actions speak louder than words.
3. Offer updates & special offers to people who sign up to receive posts or Tweets. By making people feel part of a community in some way you will increase engagement and loyalty. Highly engaged customers become advocates too. A high percentage of them will recommend you to others. Your Facebook page can provide special offers and your Twitter & Pinterest feed can too. You can also make these offers and updates local by getting each of your branches or divisions to take part in this campaign, so that customers are building relationships with the nearest branch.
4. You can track if customers achieve their objectives using your product or service using social media. You can do this buy asking them direct questions, via surveys, and by monitoring any posts they create on the subject. This is being proactively interested in how your customers get on with your service. You may only be able to do this with a select group of customers, but the lessons learned should be applicable to all similar customers. Achieving objectives is a critical issue to remaining loyal and placing the maximum amount of business with you. If you are afraid to ask hard questions then your business will eventually have big problems.
5. Communicate the benefits of your product or service, not the technical features. This is an old adage salespeople use. Sell the sizzle not the stake. It’s true for social media too. Don’t focus on how to get button A to perform service B. Tell people how service B will benefit them. Then tell them how to get it to work.

My guide to social media is available from Amazon. Enjoy!

Social Media is Dynamite for Sales

I worked in sales and sales management in the UK & Ireland for 25 years.

Social media, in my opinion, provides an unprecedented opportunity for people involved in sales to understand what is going on in prospect and client organisations. A new era of corporate openness and the widespread use of social media for customer service and stakeholder communications means that sales people, account managers of all types from national to global, have access to previously hidden data.

I have created a slideshow here: http://www.slideshare.net/SocialMediaisDynamite/social-media-is-dynamite4-sales

This describes in 7 slides the ways a major account manager/sales person can use social media to research prospects, identify problems within those accounts, listen to what is going on and to create material to propose solutions.

This ILC model (Identify - Listen - Create) can be used by all account mangers to help them sell more. It is also a model for a service to research prospects, clients and even competitors. Get in touch if you want more details.

The Social Media Puzzle: Piece #5 Is there evidence that social media is worth all this time?

There has been a constant drum beat in the media over the past few years of Luddite criticism of social media. They claim that it is all a waste of time, that social media is banal and trivial.

For those of us who value technology there has to be more than blind faith to counter such views. Fortunately, a recent scientific study has shown that social media is linked to increased intelligence.

The study, by a team at Trinity College, Dublin, replicated the evolution of social interaction over 50,000 generations. It claims to have found a link between sociability and intelligence.

Professor Andrew Jackson and research student Luke McNally conducted the research. They used neural networks and games to simulate how humans interact in society and learn.

The findings will be published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the biological sciences journal of the Royal Society in London.

My personal view is that social media forces cooperation and openness. To do otherwise on social media would lead to being flamed as a troll. Cooperation and openness lead to increased learning, as your reading of this article illustrates, which will inevitably leads to increased intelligence.

Whether I can claim that reading this blog leads directly to increased intelligence is probably a step too far though! I don't think every Tweet or post is symbol of progress, but there are enough positive ones, I believe, to make it obvious that social media is of benefit to humanity overall.

To support this site - over 60 free posts so far on social media for you to explore - please buy one of my novels, The Istanbul Puzzle or The Jerusalem Puzzle or my guide to social media. And enjoy!