FREQUENCY ISN’T A BAD THING… QUITE THE OPPOSITE

Social reach and frequency are tangential to good marketing, as long as your content is relevant to your market. How many times does a potential customer or partner need to see your message before they convert? You might as well ask how many licks it takes to get to the centre of a Tootsie Pop (remember that old TV commercial?). Some will bite after a dozen licks; for others, it’s three—depends on where your audience is in a given moment when they see your message.

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CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AND SOCIAL INFLUENCE

We are social animals. What others do does have some influence on us one way or the other. When we listen to someone because the person doing the talking is someone we trust—that’s where social influence starts. We’ll even buy a product based on the fact that others seem to think it’s great. But it’s not just a great product that gets social tongues wagging—it’s the overall experience with the brand when we look at that product, buy the product, and have it delivered. How many times have you been burned when buying a product you thought would be great at first blush, only to have a horrible experience with the vendor when it came to the purchase? Perhaps the website was glitchy or the navigation not very intuitive—or maybe you couldn’t complete the purchase without jumping through a million hoops. Or you couldn’t return the product for a full refund if you weren’t happy.

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EARS OPEN, EYES ON THE PRIZE: WHY SOCIAL LISTENING REQUIRES ACTION

The person who came up with the concept of “social listening” probably didn’t intend for the name to be ironic, but here we are. So many brands treat social listening as little more than another item on the analytics checklist. They look at the numbers, check out the latest social marketing content, come up with an idea, and then work backward to make it fit their own audience. If they’re really ambitious, they might take a spin through the mentions on the company’s branded social pages (before promptly going back to ignoring them).

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MAKE IT EASY FOR CUSTOMERS TO DO BUSINESS WITH YOU

If you make something easy to do, people are more likely to do it. They’re also more likely to come back to you in the future when they need a similar product or service. Nothing complicated about that, but it’s a point that many brands and service providers miss at a time when technology should be making things more convenient, not the other way around.

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