Using Social Media for Customer Service in Any Small Business

Social media is an important tool for marketing in any business, especially for small businesses. Aside from posting photos and other business updates, using social media for customer service can level up any small business and increase sales.

Any small business should have specific strategies in place for handling customer service issues through social media as this will also improve getting in touch with customers as well as customers inquiring about your product/service.

Social media is now the accepted leader in the mode of communications that customers are now choosing when inquiring about brands or sharing customer service issues. What also makes social media a viable marketing tool for small businesses is that it levels the marketing playing field since a small business can have just as large social media presence as a large corporation. The usual top social media sites that businesses can utilize for their customer service are:

§  Facebook

§  Twitter

§  Instagram

§  LinkedIn

§  Pinterest

Social media builds real customer relationships

Any small business can use social media as one of its main channels for both self-promotion and to respond to customer inquiries and comments. In this way, real relationships are built with customers since conversation is engaged.

Using a hashtag

In simple terms, using a specific hashtag helps to search concerns under the hashtag, making everything organized and easy to navigate. Original information and accurate content can be added to the hashtag as the business sees fit.

You can focus on creating a strong customer base

If a customer has a bad experience with the small business, one of the first things that customers is likely to do is to write about it on social media. Instead of trying to find ways on how to manage and respond to any negative comments, businesses should focus on providing such excellent customer service that they create a strong and loyal customer base that will advocate on behalf of the business if anyone has some negative comments to say.

Always present

Some small businesses fall short on social customer service because they simply are not active in listening and engaging with customers on social media. Companies that want to deliver effective customer service on social media should realize that all messages, inquiries, and comments must be flagged especially when it relates to the product or service.

Train your staff on social media

If your small business has all its employees handling customer service, then the company should have a clear understanding with everyone in handling customers, guiding principles, and protocols. Train the staff or employees by reviewing your social media strategy and product/service positioning and the types of social media tools the business uses. Walk everyone through the process for managing customer service, stress the importance of customer sentiment, and explain how positive and negative reviews can impact the business. You can also provide a list of potential questions employees need to respond to, including examples of negative feedback.

Big Social Media No-Nos Your Business Should Avoid

When it comes to social media, many entrepreneurs are self-taught. You’ve learned your way around Facebook and Twitter with personal accounts, so you figure you’re good to go when it comes to a business account. Your experience will help, but there are some unspoken rules in the social media world that you might have missed while using the sites to dig up pictures of your old high school friends.

Whether you’ve just decided to launch a social media site for your new business, or already have a well-established social presence, it’s important to make sure your sites are professional. The following are some common social media mistakes that every business owner should avoid committing.

1.     Bad Trending Choices

When you’re posting to social media, it’s natural to take advantage of trending topics. However, it’s important to make sure your post is appropriate. Too many businesses try to capitalize on trending topics, and end up posting something insensitive.

For example, in 2012 after the mass shooting at the Century movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, the hashtag #Aurora was trending, as Twitter users discussed the event and voiced their condolences. Apparently, the person tweeting for this clothing store didn’t know why #Aurora was trending, and attempted to use the hashtag to promote a dress. Needless to say, the tweet came off as inappropriate and insensitive.

Interacting with trending topics is a great way to generate social media activity for your business, but before attempting to utilize a trending topic to your business’s advantage, make sure to establish that the topic is relevant, appropriate, and not in bad taste.

2.     Overposting

When it comes to posting frequency, there isn’t a hard and fast rule, but you don’t want to alienate your followers by being a chronic “overposter.” You’ll want to look at your engagement levels to help guide the number of times you post, but if you’re using Facebook, three to five posts a week is a good number. When it comes to Twitter, a tweet a day is a steady amount of content.

3.     Failure to Respond

The whole point of social media is to engage with your target audience. If you’re not interacting with your followers, what’s the point? Even if a customer complains, or says something negative about the company, you still need to respond in a timely and appropriate manner.

Since social media is constantly up and running. If your business wants to establish a strong social media presence, your company should be prepared to respond to people's messages outside of your traditional business hours.

4.     Being Overly Promotional

You can mention an upcoming sale or advertise a new product on social media, but that shouldn’t be the only thing you’re serving on your sites. Use the 80/20 rule—eighty percent of your content should be engaging posts and information that your audience wants to read, while the remaining 20 percent should be promotional.

If your social media plan is to sell, sell, sell, you’re going to fail, fail, fail. You need to offer a diverse array of information on your sites. For example, if you own a clothing store, you could post links to fashion articles, ask for feedback on a hot new accessory, or post pictures of celebrity clothing trends. Diversity is the key to social media content.

5 Strategies to Help Your Business Succeed Thru Social Media

You may have probably been thinking how your competitors are using the best of social media in their business? Do you need help in getting started with your social media strategy? Every business has a specific set of goals and objectives that will guide them in order to successfully connect with their customers. Below, you will find some business strategies that might help you succeed and become a brand persona:

Identify the Goals of Your Business

It's next to impossible to move further without knowing the business goals you want to achieve. Whatever strategy you implement will work only when you're clear about your targets. You need to closely identify the overall needs of your business and how to reach those needs through social media.

Surely, you'll find a number of personalized goals when it comes to marketing through social media. Some of them can be included in your business strategy for attaining brand awareness, retaining customers, and to cut down the relevant costs.

Set Objectives to Measure Your Performance

Usually, the goals aren't useful if you don't have existing objectives and parameters that would let you know which goal you have accomplished. Eventually, it happens that one of your goals is already generating leads and sales, but you don't know how many leads you need to generate to move to the next target. You need to be smart to make your objectives specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound, so that you can always keep track of your progress.

Once you're done with your objectives, it's also important to get those goals achieved with the deadline. If you don't set a deadline, your efforts and resources will get wasted.

Identify your Target Audience

If your business has low engagement on social media, it means you're not reaching out to the accurate audience. Your business can rapidly grow, once you reach out to the ideal customers, at the right time, in the right place. When you're clear with your target audiences' likes and dislikes, age, and interests, it will become easier for you to target them on social media.

Get to Know Your Competitors

When it comes to promoting your business on social media, you need to be aware of your competitors' social media strategy. This would give you an idea of how they work towards reaching their targets. If you find them good enough, you can also think opf ways of how to incorporate those tactics in your business. You can also keep an eye on the content and other stuff they are posting, understand their promotional strategies and ideas, and how they respond to their audience.

Choose the Appropriate Channel

If your target audiences are spending more time on one social media platform than the other, you need to choose the one which has more number of your possible audience. This is an easy way to reach out to more number of people in a very short time.

Almost every business in existence today has its own social media profiles. If you are new to social media marketing, without wasting much time, determine which network works best for your business and reach out to your audience.

These 5 Reasons Will Convince You Why You Should Give Social Media a Break

For the average millenial, he/she checks his/her smartphone 43 times and spends at least 5.4 hours on social media per day. Considering those numbers, one might find that pretty obsessive, right? Even if you don't want to admit it, you are also experiencing this same addiction every day. With this, have you ever thought of taking a break from all these social media craze? There are millions of people who can't even fathom the thought of not updating their Facebook status, checking up with friends on Twitter, or posting photos on Instagram.

As fun and useful social media is, it's still considered an addiction. And anything done excessively is not good. If you've ever thought about taking a break from it all, consider some of these reasons why you should take one.

1. It's a Time Waster

One of the major reasons to take a break from social media is that it sucks up so much of your time. Do you notice getting caught up on FB, Instagram, or Twitter and then find yourself still scrolling an hour later? It's quite easy to get sucked into the cutesy pictures of pets, celebrity rants or outfit and diet inspo. It's just too good to put down sometimes. If you find that your social media habits are taking a toll on your time at work, school, or with family, it might be the right time to stop and take a break.

2. It Gets Annoying

It's funny how we're so into Facebook and Twitter, but so many times we come away from it feeling so annoyed and irritated? How many times can you read about your friend's workouts, their meals, their relationship drama, or their grammatically incorrect quotes on life? If you log on to your social media accounts anticipating feeling irritated about meaningless or exaggerated status updates, why not take a break?

3. It's Harmful to Your Self-Esteem

Have you ever thought about how social media can affect your self-esteem? Just as there are some friends with annoying status updates, there are others who can't stop bragging about themselves. If you're constantly reading about the fabulous life of your friends, it can start making you feel inadequate. Do you ever find yourself comparing yourself to others and not measuring up?

Is it really worth the blow to your self-esteem?

4. It Distracts You From Focusing on Your Goals

It's no secret that social media can be distracting. One minute you're checking your Facebook, the next minute you're looking at your co-worker's sister's husband's cousin's wedding pictures. Just like when you make a quick stop to Target expecting to only get one item and walk out with 20, sometimes social media can send you on a spiral that lasts several hours on a path to nowhere. Alleviating social media opens up tons of free time to focus on what truly matters -- your goals. Think of all the time you will have to get projects done that you claim you never have time to do, or simply work on towards completing more goals.

5. It Clutters Your Mind With Negativity

Not everything we see on social media has us wanting to buy a Bentley or get engaged, some things are downright heartbreaking. With so much going on in the world, sometimes stepping away from the computer and the hundreds of pictures, videos, and statuses that bring negativity will allow you to clear your mind and simply focus on the good. When negative images are drilled into your mind via social media, it can affect you subconsciously and even cause depression. Closing the apps and simply taking a break will allow you the time to center your mind and thoughts on positivity, allowing you to maintain a clear and peaceful mind.

Some Google+ Do's and Don'ts for Small Businesses

The decision may not yet be final as for the significance of Google+ for personal users. But for those who own a small business, Google+ must not be ignored. It's not just another attention-grabbing social network that a small business can use to increase its presence online, but Google+ is also one great resource to maximize visibility on Google search pages. The reason why every business owner should be on Google+ is because it works alongside with Google Search. This includes potentially ranking higher on search results, integration with important Google for Business services, and the ability to attract customers by providing key business information such as location and directions, contact number, photos, reviews, and many others -- right on search pages. Google+ also lets you promote posts, specials, deals, and other content to a variety of audiences -- whether it's from those in your Google+ "Circles" or from people who simply want to search for your business in Google.

However, you need to learn more about Google+ other than signing up for an account and sharing posts. Being able to use Google+ effectively with your small business helps in your strategy to attract more customers and engage with them better at the same time. Here are some Google+ do's and don'ts that you may want to check out so that you can properly make use of this powerful social network.

Google+ Do's

Take advantage of the SEO value

The main difference between Google+ and other social networks is that it is the social network from Google. This means that one of the largest benefits to using Google+ is its SEO value. Business owners should take this opportunity by combining their Google+ Local Page (your maps listing) and their Google+ Business Page. Through this, a business will have the chance to rise to the top during location-based searches.

Prioritize on Visuals

To help users stay engaged on your Google+ page, adding images of your business headquarters is one effective step. In addition, these images will be seen on your brand's search engine result pages (SERP) if you are locally verified. This will also give users a sense of security to work with your business online once they have clear visibility of your location, and what your office(s) and employees look like.

Actively Increase Your Audience

As part of your efforts to gain a large group of followers, add people to your circles so that you'll get a chance to be added to theirs. It is best to focus on people within your industry, as well as potential customers and professional acquaintances. Once you reach a certain number of followings, that number will be displayed next to your link when you show up in an organic search result on Google. Another thing about having a high number of followers in your circles boosts your authority with Google, thus improving your search rankings.

Target Your Audience

It might seem irrelevant, but doing a proper research on how your content will reach the proper target audience can go a long way. What do people like about your product or services? What do they normally talk about when it comes to your product or services? Do these consumers mostly consist of male or female? Do these consumers mostly located in the East Coast or West Coast? It's useless to waste crucial time on a content that is not reaching the right audience.

Make Your Post Eye-Catching

Draw the attention of viewers by formatting your posts with bold, italics, and indentation. You can also include images in your postings that will attract people to read it. Use #hashtags as well so that there is an increased likelihood that other users searching will find your mini-blog postings.

Ask for Reviews

Reach out to your customers and offer them your Google+ link to leave a review. Reviews will help build credibility for your business and give you a better edge among your competitors.

Follow Other Businesses

By following other businesses and figures that are related to your industry, this could lead to potential business opportunities down the line or just give you an awareness of important industry news and updates -- so you're always in the know.

Google+ Don'ts

Neglect Your Business Profile

Before anything else, make it a point that all important business information is supplied on your Google+ business page. Avoid skipping any important details and be sure to add as many images of your business as possible. Make sure to use keywords you want to rank for and keywords your customers are using to locate your business when filling out your profile. Also, make it a habit to link out to important pages on your website within your profile as Google+ allows you to do this.

Wait for Customers to Come to You

Take advantage of Google+'s great openness toward interacting with followers. It's very hard to communicate with your customers in Facebook because it doesn't let you reach out to them via your business page -- so they have to reach out to you first. You can offer them discounts, coupons, or simply just check in with them and continue building a relationship. That's exactly what Google+ allows you to do. Google+ allows as much two way conversation as you want. You can tag people people in your posts before they reach out to you. So go ahead and be the first to engage in the conversation with your customers, don't wait for them to come to you.

Spam Users or Communities

Don't make it a habit of posting too much in a community or just be plain annoying, because people can definitely tell if you are. People in Google+ are there for a reason and are able to sense if you are a potential spammer. If ever you get blacklisted as a spammer, then you're in trouble. Usually, it's hard to get out of that list and make headway in the community. So better not screw it up.

Post Unrelated Stuff

While it's great to post tons of food pics, lifestyle pics, things that you do before going to bed -- just make sure to do it on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. Always keep in mind not to post these stuffs on Google+, especially on your business page.

Ignore About Circles

Segment your customers. Most businesses have different types of customers, and if possible, add customers in different circles on Google+. This will enable you to provide more targeted content and have a better chance of engaging with your customers.