A little appreciation goes a long way, and that principle equally applies to your social media audience. These days in social media marketing, consumers have become more accustomed to what social platforms are about and informed about how they work - and subsequently, what benefits they provide. As such, it’s now far less about your follower count, and far more about how you interact, and engage with your online community.
Showing your followers that they're important to you is a great way to inspire interaction and engagement, not to mention traffic and conversions. I say this a lot, but social media is about building relationships, and a healthy relationship never lacks in reciprocal interaction and/or affection.
To help with this, in this post, we'll go over six ways that you can show your social media followers appreciation, and strengthen your community relationship as a result.
Here we go:
1. A Simple “Thank You” Post
Thanking your network for helping you reach a milestone (yay, 1,000 likes), or just simply saying 'Thank you for following us', is a greatly under-valued avenue for recognition, which is both easy to do and can help strengthen connection.
Social media users are being inundated with different messaging, and there's a virtually endless amount of accounts to follow. But how many are actively interacting with you personally? How many are engaging with their audience, and acknowledging their community on a regular basis?
Even the simplest engagements on this front can help make your business stand out.
2. Highlight Follower Reviews and/or Comments
You can also let your audience (both current and future) know that you appreciate their feedback by highlighting reviews on your social channels.
Recognizing feedback can be a great way to showcase social proof, while it also enables you to highlight that you do, in fact, read and care about such feedback.
And an added benefit: More content for you.
3. Feature Your Most Active Followers
Putting the spotlight onto your most active followers or users is another good way to fill in content gaps, and reward those who post about your business.
Every time you repost a user-generated photo, you're showing love to the person who posted about your brand and business.
4. Offer Special “Social Media” Only Discounts/Sales etc.
Social media only discounts are useful in more ways than one.
First, and most simply, they enable you to reward your followers by giving them an exclusive discount. But in addition, they can also be a way to gauge how many of your customers are coming from your social channels.
Tracking social media sales is generally not a straight-forward process, as people will likely see your brand content multiple times - and likely on multiple platforms - before actually buying. By utilizing unique discounts, you can directly attribute that customer action to a platform promotion, giving you more ways to attribute performance.
5. Ask Them What They Want and Deliver
What better way to really get your customers involved than by giving them a vote in what you do next?
Considering new packaging, or have a new flavor choice to make? Get your network involved (and I bet your sales team will love this too).
If you don’t sell a physical product, ask customers what they’d like to know more about, or see more of, then produce content based on their responses.
This can help improve engagement, enhance sales (since you're delivering specifically what customers are looking for) and build better community connection.
5. Run An Appreciation Contest
You could also consider running a small, easy to enter giveaway, and maybe ask for a little love in return in the form of a share or tag.
At a publication, I worked with recently, we ran a two-week contest for reader appreciation. We announced a subscription discount to our followers and randomly tweeted out Starbucks coffee vouchers to followers during the two weeks. We also asked for specific retweets and shares of the campaign landing page for bigger prizes.
- The campaign generated
- 326,306 total impressions on the hashtag
- 425 total Bit.ly link clicks
- 1,938 landing page visits
- 109 lead generation customers
- The campaign also instantly generated a renewal order of an existing subscriber for ($1,005). The month-end sales reports showed an additional four orders with the exclusive savings code setup for the campaign, generating an additional $2,900 for the company.
Keep in mind that each social media network has different rules in the way that you present a contest or giveaway, so ensure you read and understand the rules before you put a contest out there. You can always run the contest or giveaway on one specific network and drive traffic from your other networks back to it.
Showing love doesn’t have to be too difficult - just like in real life, even a simple expression of appreciation can create beautiful results. And building a relationship with your followers is definitely the way to go in the current social media landscape.
How will you be showing your followers love?
A version of this post was first published on the Dhariana Lozano's blog.