Why Personal Social Media Accounts Matter for Your Business
Most marketing experts agree that your business will be a failure if you don’t have a web presence with an active social media plan. Everyone you know likely has at least three social media platforms that they use on a daily basis. Whether your customers Snap, Tweet, or Insta, having a smart engagement plan can generate new leads in non-traditional ways.
Let’s assume you have a corporate branded Twitter account. A potential customer Tweets at you (and your competitors):
Option One: Average Corporate Engagement
The typical, good-corporate response is to respond and engage with the client, no?
No shame in this response. Engaged by using the customer’s name, fun emoji use, and close the deal with a link to a product overview. Simple, easy response that a social-media coordinator with minimal training can respond with. But is this really a powerful sales pitch? Does it really do anything to wow the potential lead?
Option Two: The Power of the Personal Twitter Response
Within minutes, the corporate response came in, just like the first:
But then this happened over the next 24 hours:
Tl;dr: A dozen different employees of Corporation 2 flooded my Twitter notifications over 24 hours with responses on why their product was the best. Likes, retweets, replies… engagement from people in sales, engineering, and even non-employees who engage with potential customers to rep the brand. I was overwhelmed with messages to not just take their word for it but to try out their product myself — by real humans.
Short quiz: Which social media engagement response gave the better sales pitch?
The answer is obvious.
Did this take more effort? Yes.
Did it require an engaged work force? Yes.
Was it worth it? 150% Yes.
Curating these accounts, by real people and not by bots, definitely takes energy and coordination, but the impact it can have on wooing your target market is immense.
To put it another way — would you rather be invited to go on a date with one interesting person who seems mildly interested or with someone who’s friends and family make you feel wanted and welcome, with nothing but great things to say about them? I will take the warm and welcoming crowd any day.
Update:
Talked with Cisco. Confirmed that this was all organic — and many of the tweets were “Ambassadors” of their product, not employees. So take away #2: make your product so good that your customers are willing to rep the brand unprompted. Says a lot about the power of customer-2-customer marketing!
