Social media marketing is all the rage right now.
There are more than 2.56 billion global social media users.
The social media boom is a goldmine for the marketing of brands and companies.
Especially when it comes to the younger demographic. One out of every three millennials says that they prefer social media to interact with brands and companies.
These are leads waiting right out in the open for you to get in front of.
Who wouldn’t jump at the chance of reaching an audience of millions every single day? Especially ones that actually want to interact with your company?
Social media marketing presents a great opportunity for brands. But it’s not as easy as just posting and waiting for millions to see.
A big problem with most social media marketing strategies is that they fail to interact in a natural, organic way.
And that’s why 60% of marketers believe that measuring the ROI of their social media marketing efforts is their toughest task in developing a social strategy.
Most marketers have trouble interacting on social media and being able to track down what efforts lead to conversions.
Thankfully, though, there are tons of big brands that are getting it right and bringing in big revenue in the process.
Let’s look at a few examples of when social media marketing goes right and how you can copy it to create your own success.
Wendy’s response time and creativity
Your customers want service and engagement right now.
Just think about it. Who likes to submit an email or form-based question only to wait 24-72 hours for a response?
I sure don’t. And if you don’t, neither does your customer.
The facts on this back me up.
The faster you respond to a customer question or comment, the more likely they are to convert. But, if you don’t respond within the first 5 minutes, you can expect a massive drop-off.
Unfortunately for most companies, response times aren’t this quick. Only 37% respond within one hour!
But if you want to create an engaging social media experience, you need to respond faster.
Because 71% of consumers who had a great social media experience with a brand will recommend it to others.
And 71% of online consumers expect to receive a response or help within just five minutes of contacting that company.
So unless you want 48% of your traffic to bounce immediately, you need to respond fast.
Adding a little pizazz to your response helps, too.
Social media is a great platform for playful banter or funny jokes.
Sites like Twitter allow you to crack simple jokes and get your audience to feel more connected to your brand.
One of my favorite examples of this is Wendy’s.
Their playful, sometimes snarky, tone gets the attention of their audience and allows them to engage with their customers in ways most brands only dream of.
On top of their conversational style, they also respond to nearly every single message or brand mention to show love and appreciation for their customers.
This isn’t just some big-brand tactic that only multi-million dollar companies with huge followings can do.
If you run any type of social media account, you should be actively responding fast and creatively.
Here’s how you can copy that technique and implement it in your own social media strategy:
Use Hootsuite for social media mentions.
Hootsuite is one of my favorite tools for monitoring mentions and responding as fast as possible.
It allows you to manage all of your social media feeds on the same platform, meaning you can run your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram feeds all at the same time. No more browsers open with tabs on tabs on tabs.
You can easily set up alerts for each account that will help you respond to any direct mentions or even simple brand mentions on your social media accounts.
Plus, you can do it without constantly refreshing your feeds or performing searches all day within each platform.
To get started, create an account on their website and head to your dashboard. From there, select the “Brand Mentions” tab.
Next, click the “Set Up Now” button. Here, you can type in your mention alerts to ping you if your company, brand, or product name gets talked about on Twitter:
Once you start typing in your name, product, or brand, you should see a preview of results on the right-hand side.
Notice that first result? It mentions my name, but there isn’t an account linked to the mention.
Without this tool, I would have never known about that brand alert! But now I can still respond fast and thank the person for sharing my content to engage with them and build loyalty.
I can also set up feeds for my products, like Quick Sprout.
Now, I can still engage from my own account, even if I’m not logged in to the brand’s page.
But Hootsuite isn’t the only tool out there. And some will even help you with a full-scale brand mention platform.
Use Mention for brand mentions.
Mention is a great, all-inclusive tool for monitoring your brand, followers, and competition.
You can do everything from generating detailed reports and analytics of your social media and engagement, to monitoring brand mentions and finding new influencers to interact with.
Since we know fast is the name of the game in social media and engagement, this tool works.
To get started, create a free trial account on their homepage.
Once you’ve created your free account, simply head to the dashboard to set up a new alert.
Here, you can choose from a variety of different options.
You can monitor your company or product to engage with customers quickly.
You can even monitor your competition to see how they engage.
Or, you can set up new alerts for topics you want to keep an eye on!
For example, let’s say you run a SaaS business. Your product focuses on live chat software.
You can use the “Anything Else” selection to monitor that live chat software topic.
Now when people are talking about it on social media, you can use those alerts to jump right into the conversation and provide insight or pitch your product.
It’s a creative way to interact with customers quickly.
To get started, type in your company, product, or topic name.
Next, you can select your high-priority social media platforms.
You have a lot of options here.
If you run a local business, you can add Yelp and get instant notifications to answer any bad customer reviews. You can do this with Amazon, too.
Next, simply click “View Results” and your new mention alerts will be set up.
Evernote’s visual content
Visual content is one of the best ways to drive more social media engagement.
And Instagram is a great place to utilize visual content.
The top brands on Instagram see a per-follower engagement rate of 4.21%, which is 58x more than Facebook and 120x more than Twitter!
But don’t dismiss Facebook. It’s still a great platform for visual content.
In fact, Facebook posts with images get 53% more likes, 104% more comments, and 84% more click-throughs:
And when it comes to effective visual content, one of my favorite brands that get it right is Evernote.
They have more than 40,000 followers on Instagram and consistently put out visually appealing content.
Evernote is a note-taking app. That doesn’t exactly scream highly engaging visual content.
But they have cracked the code on how to make the thought of taking notes fun and interactive.
And they do it in a lot of different ways.
They post awesome graphics like this:
And visually appealing posts to drive blog traffic:
And simple quotes on Facebook:
But they haven’t reinvented the wheel here. The beauty of Evernote’s methods is that you can copy this strategy with ease!
Their images aren’t hard to replicate on your own, and you don’t need to spend thousands of dollars on a designer to do it.
If you want to start posting better graphics and driving more social media engagement, take Evernote’s lead.
Here’s how.
Use DesignBold to make easy, appealing images.
Do you see that value proposition?
“Create a stunning design in just 5 minutes.”
And they aren’t lying. No Photoshop skills required.
It takes me five minutes or less to create amazing images for social posts or blog posts using their platform.
To get started, head to their homepage and click “Start Designing”:
Next, select the type of image that you want to create. You can choose from tons of different social media templates or even create infographics and blog headers.
Once you’ve selected your template style, you can begin editing your image in the dashboard.
You can edit almost anything, including the colors, text, and style. You can also add your own images.
From there, you can easily drag and drop elements and create the image you want.
In less than one minute, I created this graphic that I could use on any social media platform, and it looks pretty similar to that example above from Evernote.
Bottom line: Images and visuals work. Make sure to incorporate them into your social media marketing strategy if you want to drive more engagement.
Domino’s Facebook Messenger bot
Live chat messaging software has seen recent changes and explosive growth.
Products like Drift, Autopilot, and Intercom allow us to connect with customers in brand new ways.
We can send targeted messages, instantly answer questions, and provide much-needed support.
And these messaging options aren’t just for websites. Facebook just released their own messaging solution to businesses.
And that’s great news for social media marketers because their messaging platform is huge:
For you, this means that it’s now even easier to connect with a majority of social media users.
Facebook says that 2 billion messages occur each month on their platform between people and businesses.
On top of that, 53% of people on Facebook are more likely to do business with a company they can directly message!
And Domino’s is leading the charge for this social media marketing strategy.
They are revolutionizing the game with Facebook Messenger to convert customers fast.
Here’s what I mean.
Head to their Facebook page, and you’ll notice that they accept messages and respond fast.
When you start to message them from their Facebook page, you get a variety of options that are all automated.
You can literally order a pizza directly from their social media profile!
Instead of posting content and hoping people will convert, they’ve utilized Facebook’s live chat messenger to drive sales fast.
Remember all those millennials on social media? Well, they also love pizza (but who doesn’t)?
Domino’s has found a quick way to combine the two.
They make it incredibly easy to convert, and they make the process enjoyable.
This is a far cry from other live chat systems I’ve experienced that tend to be outdated and slow to respond.
With live automation, Domino’s can convert social media customers without any moderators needed.
When you start to click on the options, it will give you automated responses based on those selections.
And it’s not just Domino’s. Tons of other companies have found success with using a messenger as a social media strategy.
SnapTravel achieved $1,000,000 in revenue from hotel bookings made using the messenger platform.
And thankfully, you can follow suit. And you can set this up on your own without any coding!
To get started, head to Chatfuel.com and create a free account.
Next, authenticate your Facebook business page.
Select your page and hit the following button to confirm it:
Once you do this, you can start to build out your bot and customize it for your Facebook page.
For example, you can start by creating a basic welcome message that visitors will see when they open up your Facebook chat option on your page.
They have a detailed, step-by-step tutorial on their site, but I can give you some valuable tips to make the process as smooth as possible.
To start, you want to create “blocks.” Blocks are basically sequences in your messaging:
So if you look at the welcome message on the right, you will notice that, after the proposed question, there are two options: “Yes!” and “No!”
And each response will trigger a different block.
Then, to make sure the responses make sense, simply test out your bot by clicking this button in the top right corner:
Once you start the test, you should get a Facebook message from the test bot on your own Facebook page that you can run through.
This helps you fix any errors you come across and lets you get a quick feel for how the chatbot will work on your page and what the customer will see.
You can even customize different integrations, like locations, payment types, and more.
By setting up your own Facebook chatbot, you can increase your probability of capturing more leads through the platform.
But Chatfuel isn’t the only tool out there. You can try using Botsify or Sequel, both very similar platforms that will help you start creating a bot for free, without any coding.
Conclusion
Social media marketing continues to be an effective platform to reach new customers and build brand-aware audiences.
It’s no wonder. With more than 2.5 billion people using social media and millions of new accounts being made daily, social media is a treasure trove of audience opportunity.
But I don’t have to tell you this. I know you are aware of how great social media is for advertising, interaction, and free engagement with a huge audience.
It puts you in front of your frequent customers and opens the door for exposure to new audiences, too.
What’s more, it’s meeting people where they are and interacting with them in a laid-back and engaging way.
Take the social media opportunity seriously, and put together an effective strategy that will both engage and convert customers.
Follow the lead of companies getting it right, and replicate their success for your own brand.
Be sure to learn from Wendy’s and respond to customers as fast as possible and use creative messaging to build loyal followers.
Try using more visual content that will appeal to your audience, like Evernote does.
And don’t forget to set up a free chatbot, like Domino’s did, and use it to drive tons of sales directly from Facebook!
The options are limitless. You just need to pick the ones that work for you.
What are your favorite social media marketing strategies?
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