How to form juicy long-lasting social media customer relationships, and deal with a few messy ones along the way?
Imagine sitting at a poker table and not being able to know how to play poker.
You would end up loosing a lot of money, wouldn’t you?
The same goes for when you are a digital business owner, but you do not know how to build up, deal with and nourish social media customer relationships.
Things have changed.
Let’s face it.
The first thing to realize is that when you now start a business, you are not going to deal with your customers only on a physical basis.
You are dealing for the most part with computers, via email or through your social media accounts on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter,…you name it.
According to a recent UPWORK article, “Depending on your specific industry, if your company does business in the U.S., it’s likely that between 70 and 90 percent of your customers are on social media.”
Again, that’s 70-90 percent!
The chance that you have to learn how to play poker is pretty high up there.
The plus side: you can reach thousands and thousands more customers at the same time.
The down-side: you will connect with the majority of your clients through social media.
And the biggest social media platform out there right now?
Facebook.
The word that should also jump out is ‘CONNECTING’, because how do you connect with a person you cannot see, experience, hear or feel?
Here are my five tips that will help you to turn your social customers into loyal fans of your digital community.
1) Be empathetic.
Peggy Uhle was boarding a Southwest flight when one of the flight attendants told her that she needed to get off the plane. Peggy was beyond taken aback by this turn of events.
Once at the gate again, the airline employees told her to call her husband. It turns out that her husband had called Southwest because their 24-year-old son had been in an accident and was now in a coma.
Though before Peggy could make her next decision, Southwest had rerouted her flight, so she was able to get to her son via fastest route.
The company went even above and beyond to pack her lunch for when she got there and rerouted her luggage at no additional cost.
Finally, Southwest called Peggy a few days later to see how she and her family was doing.
Ladies and gents, this is empathetic customer service at its finest. Needless to say, this incident blew up on social media and has turned Southwest customers even more into loyal fans than they already were with this great company to begin with.
Whenever you interact with any social customer on social media, always keep in mind that there is a human being sitting on the other end of the net. Regardless if you can see them or not, you want to practice empathy.
According to ‘Psychology Today,’ empathy is defined as, “[…] the experience of understanding another person’s condition from their perspective. You place yourself in their shoes and feel what they are feeling.”
You have to be able to anticipate what it is that your customer is hoping to experience from doing business with you.
What is it that they want versus, what is it that they need (this will be the value part you add on to later to provide an awesome customer experience).
Do you really understand the customers request or are you reading something into it that you shouldn’t?
One of the most important things for us entrepreneurs to do is to add value to a person’s life through our products, skills or services.
How can we best do that?
How can we best figure out what a person needs or wants?
Through empathy, ladies and gents.
Should you in any case struggle with that, I would suggest you check out the book ‘Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ‘ by Daniel Goleman. I had to read this book in one of my psychology classes while still at university, and it was one of the best ones I have ever read on why it is so important to understand people.
2) Know that every written word potentially can have a double meaning and can also be interpreted in many different ways.
“The difference between the right word and the nearly right word is the same as the difference between lighting and the lighting bug.”
~ Mark Twain
I can not recount the countless of social media messages and emails that I have received, and or sent; that could have been interpreted either-or.
You probably have plenty of experiences like this yourself.
Even if you are crystal clear with what you are typing into that Facebook status update, or respond email field on your computer, you never know how the other person is interpreting your message.
Most of the time, people react to any conversation based on how they feel that day.
Are they having a good or bad day?
Well, you don’t know that since you can not go through the computer and look at the person.
However, knowing that as a business owner means that you always have to be careful about the possibility that your message – and intent of it – can be misinterpreted.
In the book ‘The Book on Writing Well‘, Paula LaRocque has an entire chapter on how to use the right words. If you are having troubles with this step, I would suggest you check it out.
3) Don’t be too shy to use emoticons.
Even you, Mr. Male entrepreneur ;)!
Though at the same time, be careful!
You do not want to overuse them either as this could potentially make you and your business look somewhat childish and well…weird.
The right use of the right kind of emoticons has increased the social media customer relationship for my brand by a tenfold.
The wink { 😉 }, as well as the standard smiley face { 🙂 }, has assisted me in establishing more outgoing connections with my clients on social media networks.
Customers want to feel reassured, and they want to feel relaxed about having a hint of what kind of person you are.
You have to give your clients and customers the feeling that they can talk to you about any possible concern that they might have before they go through with the purchase.
This way, you can be sure to set the proper customer expectation so that your social customer is assured to get exactly what he or she is looking for.
Tip: Always take your deeper conversations with a potential customer off of the main social media grid. You do not want other customers to get involved in a private conversation. Instead, you want to get to know that one social consumer as a person, a human being that is.
4) Mirror your social customers’ style of writing and language.
It is surprising to me that many entrepreneurs don’t think about this when I talk to them about their social media customer relationships.
In any customer interaction, what is the most important thing? It is to buildup that connection that we already talked about.
How do you do that the fastest?
You mirror the writing style, use of language and voice of your potential customer/client.
Are they writing in short sentences? Don’t respond to their messages or emails with essays.
Are they writing long and explicit messages? Be sure to include a lot of details in your response as well.
It is absolutely important that you do this because you are automatically increasing the, ‘Know-Like-And-Trust’ Factor of your potential customer/client.
5) Be patient.
Too often, business owners are trying to sell to their prospective clients and customers.
With this, they are ruining their sale.
How come?
Well think about it?
You would not necessarily go up to a woman or a man that you find attractive and that want to date and immediately ask her/him to marry you, correct?
There is process in any type of relationship building.
You have to woo your potential customer and client and not kick their door in.
Be elegant about it.
Be likable.
Be patient.
On average, it takes at least about 8 touch points and connections before a potential client and customer is even considering buying from you.
There is NEVER any shortcut in trying to push the sale onto a cold contact.
I hope this helped.
The one takeaway that I hope you are getting from this article as well is to have fun with it.
Put yourself in the shoes of the person sitting on the other end of the receiving connection.
There is a real person sitting there (well, hopefully at least lol).
Treat them as such and you will be rewarded plenty.
Let’s do this!
P.s.: If you feel like you could use more training on this type of online sales process, especially for organic Facebook marketing, I’d recommend checking out my FREE PDF GUIDE on Facebook Networking For Entrepreneurs.
Download link right here: https://connectforentrepreneurs.com/hello12352354
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