4 best practices to win at social media communication and promotion

Social media is where the future of your business belongs. It’s where communities are being born, thoughts are being shaped, and behaviour is receiving guidance. It’s the one roof under which you will find all of your consumers. Needless to say, your communication and marketing strategy must be equipped to make the most of it. The question is how?

Here are a few key insights to make your business social-media friendly:

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Keep your content creative, relatable, and altogether interesting

The story of YouTube’s success can only be matched by the success of those it gave a platform to. Singers, comedians, dancers, and sardonic observers have been flooding the infinite space of the digital world for many years now. The most crucial reason for their success was their ability to connect with their viewers.

Today, there are many other active platforms to launch your product from. However, the fundamental secret ingredient to success remains the same – interesting content.

The content you put out must be able to offer something to the viewer. It must make them laugh, cry, or ponder over aspects of life they were too busy to notice. Being consistent in quality and value will help you gain respect among the communities you wish to target.

Learn to deal with criticism

A creative person must be open to all sorts of feedback – good, bad, and indifferent. While good may keep you motivated, an indifferent attitude could send you back to the drawing board to come up with something new. Either way, good reviews – or no reviews at all – will keep you on your toes. But what about criticism? What to do when your audience doesn’t like what they see, and is vocal about it?

This may or may not happen to you. But it serves to be prepared nonetheless.

If you receive a complaint about your product or your communication openly on social media, you must be ready to face the challenge with your chin up. According to an article on Inc, “It's okay to pre-craft responses to your most common questions and complaints, so you can respond quickly when they crop up. But make sure to personalize your responses as well. People want a quick response on social media, but they also want to feel like they are being heard.”

Your ability to respond to a crisis, occasionally by way of laughing at yourself, can help you win the approval of even the most antagonised user/viewer. So if you thought chivalry is dead, resurrect it digitally by being honest, humble, and humorous in your dealings with censure.

Do not promote your product like a maniac

If you make the novice mistake of going overboard with product promotion, sooner than later, your consumer will see through your trick, and it will surely leave a bad taste in their mouth.

On the other hand, forgetting your product entirely, or leaving it to other channels to do the selling, might prove to be its nemesis too.

The solution is to keep a balance between the number of times you promote your product or business in your communication. According to the Inc article, “No more than one out of every six or seven posts should be overtly promotional.” While these numbers are not written in stone, the idea is to replace flood-promotions with soft-promotions in a subtle, non-intrusive way.

A good first impression lasts

Your attention to details – or lack of it – will send out signals to the consumer. It could be something as small as forgetting to include information like your email address, a click button, a contact number, or even a simple thank you, but it creates a subtle impression on the mind of the viewer.

Think of this in terms of a typical social setting – someone invites you over for dinner and then ends up on their phone or laptop the whole time. They might apologize later, but by then the harm’s already done. Most likely, you’ll never take their invitation seriously again because they forgot to respect you.

Keeping your basics organised means that you have given it enough thought to make every user experience a memorable one.

The rules of success in social media are the rules of success for anything, anywhere. It’s all about respecting your consumer, giving them something interesting to talk about, and most of all, keeping your communication simple and honest.

Read Also: Launching a product? Old-school promotions just won’t cut it