The simple truth of the matter is that you must understand your customers and that although social media (in nearly all forms) is one of the most established marketing channels in this digital era and will always improve your reach but the company and brands messages are not driven by you or your company, they are driven by your customers, in what is becoming an increasingly more interactive business environment.

More and more companies miss so many of their customer engagement opportunities that the scale of “lost revenue” must be staggering not to mention the reputation damage to the brand. The only way this is going to get better is to become 100% more customer focused. Become your own customer, this is the only way that you can get to know how they act and react to your social engagement initiatives.

Your customers don’t care or want to know about the departments and structure of your company, so our business processes should become more flexible and geared around the customer instead of performing a role or function. The information you collate from your customers should flow freely through departments and your employees need to be enabled to use that data effectively to build relationships with your customers and solve their problems.

It is important to get your employees engaged because customer engagement is a shared responsibility across your company; it’s not just for your sales, marketing and customer service departments. So empower your workforce to recognise a customer engagement opportunity and act on it and perhaps even develop a customer engagement policy. How often have you read a post from someone slating a company, product or service? I would bet quite a few, a lot more often than you will find a response from the company, product or service provider – A missed opportunity. Social media is a key way to interact with customers and build those human relationships.

Customers want to be valued and if you can respond to your customer’s issues and solve their problem, you will be creating trust, which in turn creates loyalty. Any businesses using social media are seeking to engage with their customers (both new and old) through two way conversation and soliciting opinions and feedback and with any customer engagement you achieve through social media gives you a great opportunity to create and build customer relationships and the more relevant you are to your customers, the more conversions you will get.

Find an ambassador within your company to be your social media champion, and select tools for your business that your employees use at home. This can help to promote social behaviours internally. So, get your game face on, because Gamification principles continue to be a growing way of encouraging your employees to become more socially aware within your company and when you add consultancy and strategy, it acts as an essential element to ensure adoption at all levels by addressing individual’s (customers) specific drivers and need. When you manage to get customers engaged, you automatically become their default buying option.

So we need to be proactive with our social media strategy. There’s no point in just trying to engage because it won’t work, it will only end up leaving you frustrated. You must build your online presence and reputation with things like content syndication, your Facebook Page and Twitter Feed etc. but try to move away from aiming just to get more followers, likes, shares or retweets and be more orientated towards your business objectives but still get personal with customers to maximise engagement, it is important to nurture each prospect as individual, with their own stories, rather than anonymous transactions. Customers who are engaged become loyal customers. They become advocates for your company and can promote your brand to tens of thousands of people instantly.

By listening and understanding your customers, across the social media channels, your company can become empowered to turn a customer’s negative experience into a positive one. O2’s recent use of social media for customer engagement is a perfect example of this. A potential public relations disaster became a positive story for digital marketers as the company responded to customer complaints on Twitter in a light-hearted and personal manner, winning their consumers back.

Some of the most used methods of encouraging customer engagement are soliciting opinions such as asking favourite products or what they would like to see on social media pages. Promotions have always worked well in traditional marketing and social media is no different, they are great for weekly giveaways, coupons, competitions and free products to entice Facebook fan signup. Even voting on most favourite things or asking for captions for pictures of customers with products or the use of videos for “live events”, such as podcasts and fashion shows or product demo’s and do it yourself tips.

Just remember, once it’s online it’s out there forever, for everyone to see, good or bad.

Author: Dave Lyall, PCRG Digital Ltd