Why Your Customers Recommend You
Many business owners and marketing managers we speak to want to talk about social media, and how to use it effectively to promote their businesses. The focus until now has been a numbers game, with businesses measuring their social media success by the number of followers or fans they have been able to compile.
A number of recent studies have shown that the focus should really be less on the numbers, and more about the level of engagement of those fans. In other words, what percentage of those fans are actually visiting your page, interacting, and sharing with their friends, or retweeting you, during a given time period? Accumulating a large list of fans or followers who otherwise don't care, and do nothing to help advocate you, your company or brand, may actually be worth very little.
If it makes sense to you that fan engagement is more important than total number of fans, then the next logical question becomes "what do we have to do to get fans engaged?" At this point, you start to brainstorm about new things you might be able to do to make your social media pages of more interest, new content or offers to share, etc.
It's usually at that point that we get a call, and are asked to come up with new ideas. While I'm happy to get the call and have the conversation, I always make sure the conversation does not become myopic by only considering things that can be done TO or ON a social media page to make it more interesting and engaging to the people who visit it. Questions arise such as: "Should we reward or incentivize people who visit our pages?" Or, "is there something we need to give them to make them care more, come back more, buy more, and tell friends?"
From our perspective, it's important to remember that real life is still real life. People use social media to talk about and share the things that happen in real life, and with regard to you that means real life experiences with your brand or business. If their experience with you in real life is not good, there's nothing you can do online to meaningfully change that except apologize and fix the real world problem. No amount of offers and incentives and engaging social media content can overcome the base reality of a customer's experience.
As the chart below clearly points out, if you want to increase the level of engagement with your social media fans and followers, focus on getting things right in the real world by doing what you do best, exceeding their expectations, and giving them reasons to want to tell everyone about the great experience they had with you. Whether that's serving a great meal, mixing a great drink, greeting every customer with a smile, preparing a great research report or legal brief, caring for the health of someone or their animal, answering customer service calls, or literally any other role that anyone in your organization plays that has the potential to improve a customer's experience, make sure you get it right. That's the best thing you can do to increase engagement and advocacy.
