Top tips for interacting with your customers on social media

Social media can be an invaluable tool for ecommerce businesses, allowing firms to bridge the gap between themselves and the customer. You may be familiar with how some brands and retailers use social media, flitting between branded content and irreverent humour almost on a dime.

Understanding how to utilise social media can be difficult. Connecting with your customers is essential in running an ecommerce business. However, it can be hard to parse the best ways to go about this. In this article, we’ve compiled a few tips which could help you get started.

Consistency is key

The main thing to keep in mind is that you should be trying to keep your brand voice as clear and consistent as possible. Whether this is in the copy for your listings, or a blog, or even interacting with your customers, you should follow a ‘house style’.

If you keep your voice clear and consistent, it can help you to create a more recognisable brand and help you branch beyond handling interactions directly. With a clear style it is easier for your team to maintain the tone of the brand and keep interactions consistent.

Keep it varied

While keeping your voice intact, you should also try to vary your content. You don’t have to just use social media to promote your brand. Social media lends itself well to more informal interaction with your customers.

Getting to know your customers can prove very beneficial for your ecommerce business as it can help with brand longevity and retention.

Keep in mind that not every interaction is about business. You could share articles, cute pet photos, anything really. It helps establish a sort of parasocial relationship between you and your customers. Furthermore, it could help them see you as something other than a brand on a screen.

Analytics

Monitoring your engagement through metrics and analytics can provide you with instant feedback on your posts.  You can have data at your fingertips which reflects how certain posts are doing, your brands reach and so forth. As you’ll likely know as an online seller, it’s always worth bearing this in mind.

Furthermore, you can always ask for feedback. Ping your customer base a survey asking for quantitative ratings on interactions and leave room for qualitative feedback. You can adapt and grow your voice by doing this, both by finding out what your customers like and what the ‘almighty algorithm’ likes.

Advertise yourself

A further tip is to use the feedback in how you advertise yourself. If you’re got great ratings, you may as well show them off.

This can create the impression that you’re a reliable seller and business, and mean people are more likely to take a chance on doing business with you.

Similarly, in showcasing your brand’s reputation you create a quick and easy way for customers to identify who you are and what you do. Ultimately, if you’ve got great feedback, it’ll probably bring even more customers in.

Personalise responses

When you’re interacting one to one with a customer, it might be tempting to follow a script or a template, especially in early days.

However, the best thing you can do to build a rapport with your customers is to personalise your responses. Sure, you can keep a ‘beat sheet’ replies and solutions, but if you take the time to engage with your customers personally it can help to foster that sense of loyalty.

You can do this by using their names, interacting with posts they make (leave a like or a comment!) and having asides which aren’t always business related.

Be ‘relatable’

Social media is this strange, ever-changing landscape with trends, jokes and memes which come and go more or less as the tide changes.

When engaging with your customers, there’s no harm in engaging with these trends sometimes. Tapping into the cultural zeitgeist is a great way to make your brand more relatable with you customers.

And if not, they can provide you with the opportunity to reach far beyond your usual batch of customers. Have a bit of fun with it – it can be incredibly stressful, and sometimes making a terrible joke really lightens the burden.

No matter which approaches you take when interacting with your customers through social media, the best thing you can keep in mind is to have boundaries.

While the humanistic approach is great and can foster better customer relationships, it’s important to ensure you can separate the work from your personal life. If you’re keeping yourself too open to being contacted, your work can start to bleed into your own time.