Are you willing to give your audience your time?

One of the great benefits of technology is that it often makes existing tasks easier to accomplish. That’s also one of the downsides of technology. When it comes to something like social media, it’s incredibly easy to put your online marketing on full auto-pilot.

Things like pre-scheduled sharing help build consistency and trust – they provide an important foundation.  That’s why T&S offers it as a service, because consistency is usually the hardest piece of marketing for companies to master. But for businesses to get the full benefit of their online marketing, they have to be willing to invest a little time in parallel to all the automation.

The importance of conversation

If your sole focus is getting more visitors to your site and improving your rank in search engines, social media posts will certainly help. There are a lot of businesses that have had great success with improving their search ranking by posting regular updates to social media.

If, however, your goal is audience-building, one-way communication with your audience may not be enough. The businesses that are most successful with growing their audience online are those that commit time to having conversations with their fans and potential-clients.

They respond to every message they receive and in many cases, initiate conversations with individuals.

Pre-scheduled sharing creates a strong base to build on. Conversations take things to the next level.

When your audience begins feeling like you’re listening to them, their trust turns into loyalty and that, in turn, often turns into evangelism.

Getting a personalized response from your business may be enough to push someone from feeling generally positive about you to telling all their friends how awesome your business is.

It doesn’t have to be your full-time job

You may be thinking, “Great, another thing I should do that I don’t have time for.” Luckily, it doesn’t take much time to create a lot of impact, especially if someone else is handling regular updates for you and all you have to do is respond to questions and check-in on people.

Blocking out 10-15 minutes a day to conversing with your online audience could be enough to start. In most cases, your responses don’t need to be immediate as long as you reply back within a day or so. Even if you’re a little delayed, a late response is better than silence.

Everyone’s industry is different, but spending one hour a week talking to clients on social media has the potential to be as effective, if not more-so, than the other prospecting and marketing work you invest in. What if a quick response to a stranger turned into a house sale? Or someone renewing a service contract with you?

Even if your products and services are low margin and a single sale isn’t a big deal, creating an army of fans with a minimal amount of communication can pay off big time.

A goodbye blog post

Last year, the T&S team was kind enough to invite me to write with them. It was an easy “yes”.

It’s been a lot of fun helping clients solve online marketing problems and build trust with their audiences. I’ve certainly learned a lot and have hopefully imparted some helpful advice to others along the way.

But nothing lasts forever and I’m off to tackle new challenges. Thanks so much for reading, commenting, and chatting with me on social media. I’ll see you around.