On Developing Relationships Online
SEO tips, Twitter, social media |
Image by thejbird
As marketers, we understand the importance of developing and maintaining meaningful relationships online. With a little bit of human interaction on the Web and armed with the necessary tools and communication skills, we can transform these relationships into valuable networks with a varied list of information sources, potential clients and loyal customers.
If you’re reading this site, chances are you’ve already set up social media into your brand’s marketing campaign and have created and developed your online presence across multiple social networking sites. As you map out strategies for diving head-first into social media, it’s best to scout ahead and know the playing field a tad bit more and you can put each stratagem into motion as you go. In other words: baby steps. Here are a few suggestions to keep in mind as you reach out to your target audience and develop relationships.
Quality Over Quantity- prune your Twitter followers
In your goal to reach out to your demographic and widen your social spectrum, it’s quite easy to accumulate a plethora of followers on Twitter. However, unlike interested readers who may or may not have subscribed to your site or blog’s RSS feeds, the effortless act of clicking the Follow button on your profile offers no guarantees that all your followers will actually listen to what you have to say.
While you may get a considerable sum of retweets, you can guess that the rest of the follower base are merely contributing to unnecessary noise in your Twitter feed, racketeering individuals with auto follow enabled, unmanned profiles abandoned by their users, or worse, malware bots. The concept of quality over quantity of Twitter followers comes into play here. To get the ball rolling, you may want to review your list of followers, take out the virtual shears and snip away the profiles bogging your campaign’s progress so you can better target your audience.
On a previous post, we wrote about of two third-party services, Friend or Follow and Untweeps, you can use to help weed through your follow lists.
Create Valuable Content- set expectation and follow through
Writing a piece for your Web site’s content or a blog is one thing, enriching them with valuable information is another. By making sure your content is compelling, informative and written in a engaging manner, you give your readers something they can benefit from and this will ensure repeat visits. This means well researched articles written with a solid structure and segmented to make it easy for your readers to digest. You can use a narrative tone and even inject a little humor to the mix to make your audience’s stay on your site a lot more fun and engaging.
When writing, cover topics that are interesting to your readers and would need actual discussions to elicit response. The more engaging your content is, the more your readers are compelled to read through, go into your archives of previous posts to learn more and respond by way of your Comments section. Actually asking for their opinions also helps though you have to remember to ask open-ended questions to get a better understanding of their different perspectives; unless of course you’re doing a quick poll, in which case close-ended queries would be better.
While you’re at it, make it a point to have a schedule for publishing your articles online and make sure you follow it. This tells your readers that you, as an authority on your chosen subject matter, are dependable and that they can expect fresh new content on a regular basis.
Having no actual schedule means that unless your readers have added you to their RSS feeds or news aggregating services, they wouldn’t know if you’ve posted anything new which badly impact your site traffic. Having a schedule and failing to follow through sort of does the same.
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RSpears @ April 28, 2010
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