The Internet not only allows your company to land in front of your target audience, but it also allows you to interact with them. Your website, social media and even online review sites provide you with the opportunity to connect and engage with your audience, and this is a great way to get to know your customers and their desires in order to improve your business.
You can’t simply just start talking to your audience and expect the engagement to work. In order to fine-tune your tone, you need to implement the following tips from the experts on online engagement.
Decide your General Tone
Writing blog posts and posting status update on social media is a form of engagement with your audience, but if you’re going to do this, you need to decide your general tone. Do you want the tone of your posts to come off as informative, lighthearted, witty, or any other emotion? It’s important that you decide this upfront so that you can ensure all of your posts going forward match this tone. If you are constantly bouncing from informative to emotional to witty and sarcastic, your inconsistency will only confuse your audience. Pick a general tone to stick with for your general posts, and create a schedule and game plan to ensure that all posts going forward match that tone to create brand consistency.
Be a Human
Far too many times companies make the mistake in automating their posts, and this doesn’t help your engagement with your audience. While automating is easy, it’s still important that you add some real time posts that sound like a human and not a machine. Plus, if you are ever communicating with a customer online, you want to humanize the response by giving your name and title and not creating a general response that sounds like a robot.
Be Responsive
Customers are always turning to social media accounts and online review sites in order to share feedback or communicate with companies, and it’s very important that you respond to these inquiries and comments. If a customer asks you a question about a product or service, be sure to answer them as best as you possibly can. If a customer thanks you for a wonderful experience or compliments you in another way, be sure to thank them. You also want to make sure that these responses occur quickly, which is why you should consider using a review tracker tool to help you. These tools will alert you any time a new mention of your company or a new review of your company has occurred. This way, you can respond in real time.
If you ever receive a negative review or comment, you’ll need to respond to these as well. Make sure that you are sincere in your response and never argue with a customer over the Internet. Doing so will only make the situation worse.
You also want to make sure you respond to negative comments as quickly as possible as well. If you let negative comments marinate online, you give the customer time to post these negative comments on multiple sites, and you also give other customers the opportunity to join in. By responding quickly, you let the customer know that you care about their thoughts, and you show them that you are taking the right steps to right the wrong.
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- Image courtesy of Smart photo stock
Guest Author: Lizzie Lau is a freelance writer and online marketing consultant with SEOMap.com. Lizzie combines personal opinions and research to create appealing and informative articles on various topics.