As small business owners, we spend a lot of our time looking for and attempting to woo new clients to sign up for our product or service. Our current clients don’t often get the benefit of our attention once they sign on the dotted line.

Loyalty is not automatic, it is earned through interactions. A neglected client is a prime target for your competition. If you truly want brand loyalty, you have to earn it by making your current clients a priority by nurturing those relationships.

Engage with Them on Social Media

Do you follow your clients’ social media channels? If you don’t already, you should do that immediately. If you aren’t sure how to find their channels, I guarantee that they have them listed at the top or bottom of their company website. (Seriously, go follow them right now, we’ll wait.)

It’s not enough to simply follow their channels, however. You should also make it a priority to like, comment, and share their posts (as appropriate). Engage with the posts. Ask questions or start conversations in the comments. This is incredibly helpful for their social media engagement and they’ll remember your help.

Plus, the more you engage with them, the more they’ll naturally show up in your newsfeed – making it easier to keep up with your clients and engage with their content.

Communicate and Connect

Each social media channel has its own private messaging feature. Spend some time each month sending notes of appreciation through social media messages. This is another way to showcase your appreciation for your clients while staying top of mind in a positive, generous way.

If you come across, or create content, that you feel they will appreciate – go ahead and send them messages with links to the article, video series, podcast, or other content.

Don’t forget to invite your clients to join you at trade shows, networking meetings or other in-person events where you can introduce them to new people and get some quality face time in as well!

Checking In

We often only reach out to our clients when we have questions, problems, or when we are attempting to upsell them in some way.

What if you reached out, on a regular basis, just to see how they were doing? If you really want to nurture the relationship, use social media to invite your clients out to coffee, happy hour, or lunch so that you can connect in person.

It’s key that you DON’T use this time to try to sell them. The purpose is nurturing the client relationship.

It can feel awkward, or time-consuming, to call people regularly and impersonal to send out a bunch of emails. Connect with your clients on social media instead to attain a more personal way of nurturing your client relationships.

Be sure to Follow us and Let’s Engage!

Hollie Clere of The Social Media Advisor is a “#BeAwesome” Developer, Social Media, Brand Builder, Content Manager, Trainer and Author in LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Blog, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, and the tools to manage them.

Click here for Social Media Training, Speaking and Strategy Consultations.

When social media marketing works well, it establishes a personal connection between the brand and their audience. Small businesses that only post when they have something to sell, will find that their followers don’t engage with their content.

These business owners often go out and tell other businesses that ‘social media doesn’t work.’

The truth is that social media marketing doesn’t work for brands that are only in it for themselves. It doesn’t work when a business owner spends zero time thinking about what their audience actually wants, enjoys, or is interested in seeing in their feeds.

How can you actually build a relationship with your audience using social media and make social media marketing work for you?

Create Content for Your Audience

There’s an overwhelming amount of content being uploaded to social media every minute. That’s a lot of noise. How do you get your social media posts seen by the right people?

First, you need to know who your target audience actually is. Because, to truly reach them, you have to create content they actually enjoy. That means the majority of your social media posts are not only geared towards the people you want as clients but that the content also aims to educate, entertain, inform, or inspire your audience.

This works best if you actually have a conversation with your target audience and ask them what type of content they consume. What do they enjoy on social media? Ask them directly, what would you like to see from my small business?

Engage with Your Audience

The second way to ensure that social media marketing won’t work for your business is to post and leave. Social media schedulers allow us to batch and schedule content months in advance. However, if you aren’t regularly checking for engagement and then responding to your audience, they will quickly learn that you aren’t present and they’ll stop engaging with your content.

Social media is meant to be social. You can’t just post content and then forget about it. You have to be present for your audience. Ideally, you are starting valuable conversations with them on a regular basis.

User-Generated Content

The most powerful content you can create comes from having interacted with your audience first. Polls, surveys, engagement questions, and social media conversations are all super valuable when it comes to creating content your audience actually wants. Don’t undervalue these exchanges. Figure out how to repurpose them or use them to create quality posts for your people. This is called user-generated content.

Social media marketing can be a highly effective way to reach and connect with your target audience. The key is in understanding how, and why, social media marketing works so that you can build your platforms correctly and share content that actually matters with your followers.

Be sure to Follow us and Let’s Engage!

Hollie Clere of The Social Media Advisor is a “#BeAwesome” Developer, Social Media, Brand Builder, Content Manager, Trainer and Author in LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Blog, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, and the tools to manage them.

Click here for Social Media Training, Speaking and Strategy Consultations.