By Jeff Korhan
Standards of professionalism vary from one industry to the next. In the snow business, it includes operating safely, keeping equipment clean and well maintained, and having a trained and courteous staff.
Just as you do these things for your customers, you now must also deliver a well-designed and well-executed social media presence for them. Why? They’ve come to expect it. Social media may still technically be optional, but avoiding it much longer may send the wrong message to your customers.
More than marketing
The main reason companies started using social media was to reach customers more easily. Companies learned that the most effective way to be found by new customers was to be a resource for them. This worked so well that customers, in general, have learned to go to the social networks to get the best and most timely solutions to their problems.
Being a helpful resource via the social networks tells the community that you are not only in the game, but that you are also a player. Much like being a member of SIMA serves as an indication of your professional standards, so does maintaining a social media presence that serves your community.
Social media started out as something to do for ourselves. That’s why we called it social media marketing. It has morphed into an essential practice that companies do for their customers. In that sense, it is more customer service than marketing.
As we all know, great customer service is marketing. This is why the Web has become the place where customers go for the best service. You ought to be there ready, willing and capable of providing solutions for your community.
The following three practices will help you take your current customer service practices and extend them to the Web, where your future customers can also benefit:
Be available to serve. Every customer expects and deserves outstanding service. In the snow business, this means being available 24/7. Prospects are also looking for evidence of great service before they will buy from a company, and one of the ways to experience that is through online conversations.
Whether you think of it as marketing, sales or customer service, being available on the social networks to answer questions from prospects and customers is now a business responsibility. If you do not take this responsibility seriously, it will only be a matter of time until one of your competitors does.
You can do this by first establishing a presence on all of the major social networks. This will ideally include the following:
- LinkedIn profiles (Personal and Business)
- Twitter profiles (Personal and Business)
- Facebook (Personal profile and Business page)
- YouTube Channel (Business)
- Company blog
While it is not necessary to have a presence on all of the social networks, it is advisable to at least have a distributed presence that accommodates the individual needs of your customers. For example, some may learn about your business from your Facebook page, but prefer to initially engage with you on LinkedIn, where the culture is more formal.
Of course, many prospects still prefer to call or email, so be sure to have your contact information visible on all of your social networks.
Be ready and willing to respond. Worse than not using social media at all is setting it up and abandoning it. To someone doing an online search, this clearly sends one message—we don’t care enough about you to be here.
However you use social media to interact with your community, it is essential to be willing to provide timely and consistent responses. You may not have all of the answers they want, but you have to show you are willing to make the effort.
There are many monitoring tools available that allow you to easily monitor and respond to your community. Postling.com is one of my favorites. It provides email notifications when there is a comment on your Facebook page, LinkedIn profile, YouTube channel or Twitter. You can respond to any of them directly from that single interface.
Freely share your expertise and capabilities. The best use of social media is to provide valuable content that gets shared, effectively engaging new prospects with your business. This is the art of content marketing—creating useful or desirable content, distributing it to those that can benefit most from it, and personalizing it to encourage engagement.
This may be the most valuable aspect of social media for any business. Unfortunately, this is one area where most small businesses fall short. The reason is it takes an investment of time to create high-quality content on a consistent basis, and small businesses, for the most part, are already stretched thin.
I respect the challenge, but I also know that the investment pays off for you and your community. When you provide any useful content that your community values, you instantly establish your capabilities and your expertise. That’s for the community.
When you do this consistently, you get better at understanding what they really need. That’s for you and your team. It literally makes you a better company. This is why social media is no longer an option; it’s now a responsibility for any business that wants to operate to the highest professional
standards possible.
Jeff Korhan is a speaker, consultant and top-ranked blogger on new media and small business marketing at www.jeffkorhan.com. Korhan will speak on social media and relationship building during sessions at the Snow & Ice Symposium, June 22-25.
