How a Social Media Assistant Can Help You Build Lasting Customer Relationships

If you’re looking to bring your company or product into the social media sphere, you’ve already recognized that there are new opportunities in this playing field. You probably understand that social media can offer so much more than an additional channel for your marketing message, but you may not know how—or have the time—to best take advantage of those opportunities.

Social media provide the opportunity to create and execute an overall communications strategy that can engender long-term customer loyalty, streamline customer service, and increase sales.  A qualified social media assistant can help you create and execute your strategy, nurture your brand affinity, and create lasting customer relationships.

1. Create your strategy. Are your goals short-term or long-term? Do you want to focus primarily on capturing leads or the long-term building of your brand and reputation? A social media strategist can help you zero in on your objectives and recommend the platforms that will best suit your needs. In this phase, you will also determine if you will personally be “listening”, responding, writing, and engaging online or if you plan to empower your social media assistant to do this on your behalf. Either way, you will scope out the tone and style of the online “you”.
2. Execute your strategy. Once you’ve determined the platforms that best suit your business needs, you will create your online identities. A few examples include: signing up for Twitter and building a following, creating a Facebook page and/or company page on LinkedIn, starting a blog…  Once your identities are established, you or your social media assistant will link them together. You can set up your twitter status to automatically update your Facebook status; sign up for Twitterfeed and link your blog to it. Join groups and networks related to your business and begin contributing content and connecting with others.
3. Nurture brand affinity and customer relationships. Your online identities are established and linked, you’ve joined groups and networks, and have followers and other connections – now what? The key to ongoing success is participating routinely to maintain relevance, listening, and being responsive.A social media assistant can work with you to engage on a consistent basis. Engagement may include posting blogs, tweets, and other comments regularly—being a brand evangelist—and it also includes listening to what’s being said about your company and responding to customer inquiries and comments. If someone has taken the time to write something about your product or service, taking the time to write back will enhance your company’s reputation. Studies show that when customers have an issue and you respond quickly, they can be even more loyal to your brand than individuals that never had an issue in the first place. A social media assistant who really understands your product can be invaluable in deepening these affinities and this helps reduce other customer service costs.

Are you ready to get your feet wet? With the right social media strategy, your social media presence can quickly become a greater return on investment than your offline strategies. Remember, you don’t have to do it alone. The right social media assistant can help you “stop selling” and “start building relationships and helping people buy”.

To find out more, grab KBJ’s “7 Reasons You Need a Social Media Manager Right Now!”

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This post was written by:

katebuckjr

Kate Buck (otherwise known as @katebuckjr on Twitter) is the Founder and CEO of KBJOnline, a social media management and consulting agency in Austin, Texas. Kate has worked with some of the top names in Internet Marketing as well as consulted with dozens of entrepreneurs, businesses and nonprofits both across the United States and internationally. She has hosted wildly popular events at leading interactive marketing conferences around the country as well as developed a social media manager training program in which more than 10,000 people have participated. You can follow her on Twitter: http://twitter.com/katebuckjr

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