Tasha Harrison

With any social networking you’re doing it isn’t enough to just talk at your followers and fans. They’ll quickly turn off to your incessent stream of links. The reason people join social networks is to talk to their friends and make new ones, so the most effective social media strategy will look for ways to join in the conversation.

Tips for how to engage and become part of the conversation:

1. Talk to people - watch what your followers are saying by following them back. Then reply to comments, questions and articles.
2. Retweet people – if someone posts an interesting article that you think your followers will appreciate, retweet them. See Retweeting made easy for tips on how to retweet.
3. Monitor what people are saying about your brand using Twilert. Then follow them and talk to them. If their comments are positive you can thank them, if they’re negative it is an opportunity to respond.
4. Always follow people back – if someone follows you and you follow them back they will instantly feel more positive about your brand. Don’t become like the celebrities who follow a select 50 or so people, Twitter is not a one way stream. (The only occasion when I’d recommend you don’t follow someone back is if they are obviously a spammer or a bot.)
5. Use an application like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck. These are both great services that help you organise your followers, making it possible to follow hundreds of people. By organising your followers into groups it is far easier to sort through the thousands of tweets in your Twitter stream.
6. Write a good description of your business and what you’re going to be tweeting about in your Bio. Try and identify the person who will be tweeting or the team, so that people know who they are talking to.
7. Always use an image, either your logo or a picture of the person who is tweeting. If there are a team of people tweeting from different accounts then each person should have a personal picture.

1. Build a relationship with your customers

   If you walk into a shop and the shopkeeper sits you down, makes you a nice cup of tea and discusses exactly what product is best for you, you are more likely to return. By speaking with your fans and not just at them you can create the same warm fuzzy feeling.

2. Customer services

   There are instances where people may talk about your brand, make a complaint or be unable to sort out a problem through the normal channels. You can monitor social media sites and reply to these people. They may reveal problems you didn’t know where there.

3. Your fans can become your brand champions

   They share your content, they suggest your Facebook page to their friends, they promote your Twitter account through #followfriday. They do the hard work for you.

4. Show your brand’s personality

   What sort of person is your brand? What music do they listen to? What do they wear? This can all be communicated through talking and sharing stuff with your fans and followers.

5. Be consistent

   The way you speak to your fans across all your social media sites should be the same, your fans will expect you to act in a particular way.

6. Create guidelines for your staff

   If more than one person is writing your content, you need to make clear to them how they should conduct themselves and what they can and can’t talk about.

If ever I saw the benefits of social media for a brand it was last night and today via Twitter. I live at the end of a half mile lane in the Sussex countryside (at the moment). Recently some BT engineers were spotted undertaking some work at the bottom of the lane, a few hours later our broadband went down. A stressed phonecall to my neighbour, who is a web designer, revealed that our landline numbers had changed. The BT engineers had somehow got the wires crossed!

From this address we currently run four businesses, two of which are online based, so this obviously caused massive problems. After some heated discussions with BT personnel in a call centre we were promised normal service by the end of play the following day.

Once I had recovered from my anger I decided to test BT’s customer service and, knowing that they were one of the biggest brands to venture onto Twitter, I tweeted my disgust.  This is the tweet: “Little rant about the idiots at BT: not only have they cut off our internet but they’ve changed our phone number! So annoyed, not surprised.”

The following day, once I had got my internet back I found this from @BTCare: @TashaHarrison Oh dear this does not sound good at all, Can I help you?

It might have come after the problem was fixed, but it made me feel like they were listening. It also delighted me that I was part of a successful internet marketing strategy by a massive brand.

If anyone ever doubts the power of Twitter and the role it can play in customer service then think about how easy it was for them to make me feel better about their company. It doesn’t take long to monitor the internet and then say a few kind words.