The Best Social Channel For Your Retail Brand Revealed By PurpleFruit’s Social Guru
The Best Social Channel For Your Retail Brand Revealed By PurpleFruit’s Social Guru
Did you know that out of 64.1 million people living in the UK, 34 million of them are using social media? That’s more than 50% of our population. Now as a retail brand, you’re most likely aware of the importance of social media already, therefore we’ll spare you the waffle on these amazing facts. You know the score. Social media is absolutely vital!
So instead, we’re going to talk about the largest social media platforms, the likes of Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, for instance.
Now, there is no definite answer to the title to this blog that can be carbon copies for all brands. The best social channel for your brand will depend entirely on what you sell and who you sell to. Social media is fantastic for amplifying your brand and enabling near-instantaneous communication between customers and followers/fans.
Customer experience and engagement is the main focus in this blog post today and we will take into consideration just how you can use these social platforms to make your audience love and trust you more than ever before!
How Customer Service and Social Media Come Together
According to research from econsultancy, over a third of customers would prefer to speak to a company on social media than to speak with them directly on the phone – which is an absolute key statistic.
But think about it, how easy is it to simply type a question and tweet it than to search endlessly for a phone number to then be stuck in a queue with a nasty phone bill? Social media speeds pretty much everything up whilst the quality of service remains high.
“ In order to deliver fantastic customer service on social, you must be personal, empathetic and super-fast in response.”
Let’s explore this statement further:
Personal
Whenever you address your customer for the very first time you should always call them by their first name. If you fail to do this then your reply could appear cold and unfriendly.
Although, it does depend on the circumstance, for example, the elderly may not like to be addressed by their first names, so to avoid this just take a couple of seconds to glance at their profile so you can generate an appropriate response. Most importantly, never reply like a cold robot!
Empathetic
You know that saying, “the customer is always right” well yeah, that applies to social media too. It is absolutely vital that your responses to your customers show empathy so they believe you genuinely care about their circumstance and appreciate their custom.
Super-fast Response
A fast response will either be the make or break between you and your customer. You need to give your customer the information they need before they take their custom elsewhere.
Find Out Which Channels Your Customers Are Using
By using the same channels that your customers use, you will be highly successful on the social channels that are most popular amongst your target audience.
When it comes to Twitter, you and your brand will need to think of it as an ongoing Question and Answer session. Customers will expect you to answer every question you are asked and you are expected to do it in a timely fashion. With Facebook and Instagram, this is not always the case!
According to research from Econsultancy, over 60% of customers expect you to respond to their question within just 2 hours on Twitter.
So as you can imagine, responding quickly is absolutely vital. Not doing so can lead to the following:
- Loss of a sale or conversion
- Lose the customer entirely
- Accuse you of being ignorant to their followers – the domino’s effect- which you could lose their custom also.
So, whats the best thing to do when it comes to using Twitter as your brand? Be nice and do it on a super fast basis.
Instagram is incredibly easy, you all you have to do is post a photo/video with a caption. Its that straightforward!
With over 300 millions users and over 70 million photos posted every single day, it is an incredibly popular, and powerful social media platform. My advice to all brands using instagram as a brand is to create a nice balance of self-promotion and lifestyle-depiction. Ensuring you heavily focus on the latter to promote a realistic profile that’s more interesting to your followers.
If you can promote photos that connect to your audience’s aspirations and interests then you will be able to project your brand values effectively whilst maintaining your follower’s interest.
Heres another whopping fact you are all going to love, over 94% of the UK’s social media users are using Facebook. With over 1.44 billion monthly users across the globe, Facebook is without a doubt the most popular social platform in not just the UK but in the world.
Over 40 million small businesses across the world are using Facebook, meaning there is huge marketing opportunity there. However, in order to break through you will need to be strategic and relentless in your creation of diverse and engaging content. Out of all three social channels, this one has to be the most time consuming.
To Summarise…
Just like everything in marketing, work, and life in general, your success on social media will depend solely on the amount of effort you are willing to put in.
Over the years, PurpleFruit have found huge success by experimenting with different types of posts across the three channels to help us work out which kind of content suits each one. Once you have got your head around that then you are ready to go.
At PurpleFruit our primary aim on social channels is to entertain and educate our audience whilst offering them support and help. If you would like PurpleFruit to manage your social side of things or if you would simply like some advice, give us a call today! – We are here to help!
Best
Nicole
Facts and figures references from Econsultancy.
Header photo by Jason Howie
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