5 Steps to Plan Your Social Media Customer Engagement Strategy

Social media has undoubtedly become the most popular platform to reach out to customers. However, engaging and retaining customers through social media requires a well-thought out approach. You can’t just expect your customers to respond on social media without having a smart strategy. While devising your social media strategy to engage and connect with customers you need to make sure that it is aligned with your customer service goals. Start off by defining your objectives, once you clearly know what you want to achieve you can effectively implement your strategy. The most important factor while developing your social media plan is to choose the right channel, it is a wrong notion that you have to use all social media channels to engage customers, instead focus on selecting the most effective ones. Be original with your social media strategy and constantly innovate for best results. Have a look at this five step plan for an effective social media customer engagement strategy!

Be Clear About Your Objectives

If you want to successfully engage customers through social media, set realistic goals. Don’t put idealistic numbers and goals in your plan. Once you have well-defined objectives, you can concentrate your efforts in the right direction. Having monthly and quarterly goals for your social media strategy would also help you gauge the effectiveness of your plan and add or change anything with the passage of time.

Utilize the Right Channels

Once you know what you want to accomplish through your social media strategy, the next step is to pick and utilize the right channels. You need to research your customer base and then identify the most effective social media channels to engage customers. Be accessible on channels that your customers mostly use, update your company’s profile on these channels regularly and respond to any queries and comments in minimal time. Actively manage your social media accounts on the chosen channels and make sure you engage and connect with every single customer out there.

Post Quality and Interesting Content on Regular Basis

Designing a content strategy is one of the essential steps of your social media plan. You need to post quality and interesting content on a regular basis to grab the attention of your customers. Offer diverse and compelling content on your social media channels to engage more customers. Make sure that your content is a mix of words and visuals; use blog posts, video blogs and infographics to stir the interest of your customers. Content posting should be consistent. Avoid repetitive and lengthy posts; concise and original content is likely to get read and shared more.

Be Original and Innovative

You need to be original and innovative with your social media strategy if you want to successfully engage and retain customers through it. Conduct research on which companies are doing better on social media and also on ones that have failed, learn the techniques for successful social media engagement and avoid the mistakes that can lead to failure. Think out of the box and try your best to bring in innovation to your social media customer engagement strategy. Focus on how you can improve customer experience through social media and bring in something new to your plan.

Gauge the Effectiveness of Your Strategy

In order to check the effectiveness of your social media strategy, you need to gauge your performance on various channels regularly. Customers’ expectations can change over time, therefore you need to make changes to your social media plan accordingly. Keeping a track of your social media goals will make you aware of where you need to focus more and if there is something new that should be made a part of your strategy. Stay updated with the latest social media trends and if you think your previous strategy is not bringing fruitful results, utilize new techniques to engage and connect with customers.