How You Should Leverage Social Media Support Services To Drive Social Media Engagement and Sales?

Social media has now become an integral part of a customer’s journey and interaction with a business. Consumers are using social media to discover new brands, products, and services. This is good news to all the businesses that are looking to drive sales through social media. According to Forbes, 1 in 4 consumers follow brands on social media from whom they might make a purchase. Consumer shopping preferences are increasingly shifting to social media. Having said that, a metric that is of astounding importance in driving sales on social media is consumer engagement. Without this engagement, social media tends to merely be media. Right engagement and conversion strategies, assist businesses in leveraging the power of social media to drive sales thereby boosting revenue.

Social media provides you an opportunity to connect and engage with potential and existing customers on an individualistic level. Some of the ways in which you as a business can use this to your advantage are:

• Use social media analytical tools to understand your target audience’s interaction with your brand or other competitors
• Track and understand the formats of content that your target audience prefers
• Use social media promotions to drive new leads

Strategies That Impact Social Media Engagement and Sales

1.Understand Your Social Presence

Social media insights are key to gauging perceptions about a brand. Through parameters such as comments, likes, hashtags, and reviews you can gain a deeper understanding of customer’s behaviours which in turn can help you increase engagement and sales. You can set KPIs to measure your performance and optimize strategies. Using reporting and analytical tools, you can understand and recognize

• where most of your sales leads are arising from
• top-performing content and platforms
• opportunities in which you can optimize targeting

2.Improve Your Social Media Response Time

Social media response time is the average time taken by you to respond to your customer’s queries. 40% of customers expect you to respond to their queries within one hour. Therefore, your social media response time is a competitive advantage that you can leverage to achieve higher levels of engagement. A proactive customer service strategy that attends to customer’s queries on social media instantly, distinguishes you from your competitors. Using social media dashboards, automated replies, and tracking factors like busiest period for queries, average reply rate will help you improve your response times and engage with your customers more effectively.

3.Social Listening

Monitoring conversations about your brand on social media assists you in responding to their queries or issues even when they didn’t reach out to you. Using social listening as a tool, you can track social media platforms for mentions and conversations about your brand. You can even use it to discover opportunities where you can be proactive as a brand. Close to 60% of brands believe that social listening increases customer engagement and sales. It is one of the best tools to gain insight into how your customers perceive your brand.

4.Appreciating and Acknowledging Feedback on Social Media

Identifying positive feedback to appreciate and thank the consumers can go a long way in building customer loyalty. At the same time, also acknowledging negative feedback can help your customers know that you are listening to them. Both approaches can help in increasing engagement. These feedbacks also provide important insights to identify popular and successful products.

5.Social Media Analytics

Collecting data from various social media platforms and evaluating it can help you take the right marketing decisions to drive sales. It is broader than just tracking metrics like follows, shares, retweets etc. It uses specifically designed software platforms similar to web search tools.  With the help of social media analytics, you can:

• Spot trends related to products and brands to increase your own sales
• Derive customer sentiments to build engagement
• Make tactical adjustments in strategies related to resolving customer issues

Outsource Social Media Support Services to Optimize Opportunities in 2022

Due to low organic reach, high response times and increasing competition, driving engagement on social media can be challenging. With the help of dedicated social media customer service support teams, you can improve engagement rates to grow sales. Improving engagement rates are directly tied to understanding customers’ needs. This has never been easier thanks to customer social media analytics and social listening. Customer’s needs can be met in real-time in a highly personalized manner. Companies can outsource social media support services to dig deep and identify what makes customers happy and what makes them dissatisfied. In a nutshell, successful social media engagement can be attributed to these key factors.

The post-pandemic scenario will witness an increasing number of customers interacting with brands online through social media. To optimize opportunities presented by this trend, businesses will need to leverage social media support services to achieve the goal of increased engagement and sales.