How to build your online presence via social media

There is no greater way to engage with customers than face-to-face encounters, whether in a shop or at a show. Once those relationships are established, it’s vital to continue to nurture and invest in them to create long-term and returning customers.

We are always encouraging exhibitors to establish leads at shows by collecting the contact details of customers and those who expressed interest in their brands and products. These leads make up a strong database of your target audience.

From here, there are many marketing tactics you can use to reach your target audience from e-newsletters, mail outs, etc.

A cost-effective way to ensure you frequently stay in touch with your audience is to invest the time in building a social media community. A lot of small businesses fail to communicate effectively with their audience via social media, as they can’t afford to invest in a social media guru, or take time away from their business to attend courses to learn how to effectively engage online.

Therefore, we would like to offer the following tips on how to effectively build your online presence:

Identify which channels your audience most frequently use

This is the first task you need to take if you’re looking to create one or more social media accounts. Add a question to your customer feedback form about which social media channels they spend the most time on, or benchmark your competitors to see what channels they utilise and where their customers engage the most with them, e.g. record the number of followers, likes, comments and shares their page and status updates achieve.

Key messages and tone

Before creating content, create a key message document, with messages that reflect your business’s tone of voice and core values, e.g. Expertise Events prides itself on delivering a live experience for all attendees.

Create engaging content

It’s one thing to be active on social media but another thing entirely to engage with your target audience. Put yourself in their shoes and try to understand what it is they want to see. Social media is a great way to promote your brand, but be careful to ensure not all content is promotional. The objective with social media is to create a community that leads to long term relationships rather than quick sales. Think carefully about what your customers want to hear about e.g. industry news, community news, inspirational quotes, special offers, business milestones e.g. an employee’s 10 year anniversary of being with the company, upcoming events you’re exhibiting at, etc.

Create a content calendar

Once you have figured out a general content guide, create a content calendar. This is a great way to ensure your content is evenly spread and gives other people in your organisation the chance to look over your content to fact check and proof read. You will also have to decide on how frequently you will be posting content. It’s important to make this decision after you create your content as it’s more important to post quality content then to post average or irrelevant content that your audience won’t engage with.

Crisis messages

The challenge of being present on social media is that a disgruntled customer has a public platform to express their dissatisfaction. It is extremely essential to have messages everyone in your organisation has pre-approved, so that if an issue arises, you have the sign off to answer immediately with an approved message that will stop the negative commentary from escalating. To do this, write a list of messages that may possibly arise e.g. “I was promised my parcel would arrive by Thursday and it is now Tuesday and it is nowhere to be seen. Not happy.” After you’ve developed a list of potential statements, write responses to combat each message and then seek approval from the appropriate people.
We hope these tips help you form stronger relationships with your customers.