Customer acquisition is the only pillar of social media that cannot stand alone. Brands can attract tens of thousands of fans and followers without ever acquiring a new customer or making a single sale attributable to the channel. Ouch! That’s scary to think about. Imagine all of the resources that have been invested in social marketing over the last five years that haven’t generated one iota of return.

Companies that offer deep discounts (like Woot!) draw new customers with incredible offers. Others like Apple have passionate fans that drive social activity with minimal company involvement. Everyone else has to rely on their customers to attract prospects that can be converted. Communities must have a solid customer base foundation to succeed.

Early corporate adopters of the social channel were often disappointed in the results and stopped participating. Their frustration is easy to understand because they expected their activity to attract customers. When it didn’t, they were told that they weren’t remarkable enough and shown success stories from Apple and Zappos! No one bothered to explain that the companies used for examples were exceptions. They had an established fan base before entering the social arena.

Building a solid community from your loyal customer base is the best way to attract quality prospects that can be converted. The people who use your products and services are the ones who are most likely to have friends and family that would like your company too. You have already established a trusted relationship, so you don’t have to do the “like me because I have great content dog and pony show.” You have great content because you are communicating with your customers.

Use every opportunity to encourage your customers to participate in your social communities. Tacking a link at the bottom of an email or webpage is availability, not encouragement. Sending an email with the sole purpose of increasing your customer activity on your pages is encouragement. Adding an added value like a discount is motivation. People will participate if the reasons are compelling enough. Finding the things that motivate your customers to join your communities is a top priority in a successful social strategy.

After you’ve established your core base, encourage them to invite their friends. The best way to do this varies by company, but finding what works with your customers is worth the effort. They become your best sales team. This is almost perpetual motion marketing. You treat your customers right and encourage them to share with their friends. They share their experiences and attract new customers. You treat the new customers right and encourage them to share with their friends. They share…well, you get the idea.

There are two things that make social media work as a prospecting channel: Treating customers right and encouraging them to share with their friends. Expecting anyone to introduce new people to your business because you have great content and are likeable is an exercise in futility.

Social search is the most underutilized marketing tool available today. The combination of the search engine power with social network opinions works together to influence people’s buying decisions. Search results with social proof have more credibility.

Natural search is one of the best ways to attract prospects and encourage customers to return to your website. It is economical and effective. And, when it is done well, little maintenance is required to keep people coming back.

Engaging with your community encourages individuals to share your information with their network and provides social proof but this isn’t enough to optimize social search. The basic requirements for natural search success also work with social search. Good keywords and links improve your company’s visibility and guide people to your website. Without them, social proof does little to promote your business.

We learned this the hard way when testing the recommendations for social media success several years ago. When Twitter was relatively new, we spent two years testing the effect of sharing quality content in the form of marketing and operational tips to see if they would generate leads for our business. The results were dismal. The tweets were regularly shared with other communities but not one lead was generated. Zero. Zip. Nada. There were no spikes in traffic on our website. No increased sales of our guides. No bumps in our free newsletter subscriptions. The bottom line was that we invested two years and received nothing that helped our business grow.

The education made the experiment worthwhile. During this time, Google launched social search. We saw our tweets showing up in real time results. Since we didn’t include links, people who wanted more information had to go to Twitter and then navigate to our site. This didn’t happen because people have to be really motivated to make the extra effort. Our best takeaway was to always make it easy for people to connect directly with us.

There are three components to a successful social search strategy:

1. Solid Content

   People need a reason to act. It doesn’t matter what you want them to do, if the content doesn’t provide enough information to give your business credibility and motivate the reader to seek more, nothing will happen.

2. Good Keywords

   Social search works the same as regular search. Bots are doing the work and following the algorithm provided by the engine. Including the keywords and phrases that match people’s needs to your company’s solutions is the most effective way to get top rankings and generate quality leads.

3. Navigational Ease

   Always include links to the next step in the process. Direct selling rarely works in social media. You need a plan that moves people from initial interest to conversion. Map it out before creating the content so everything works together.

Creating a search strategy is more about technique than creativity. It doesn’t make campaigns go viral, but that is okay. It is much better than that because it provides consistent, sustainable traffic every day that grows over time. Start investing in your company’s future today by optimizing every post, tweet, and update for search.

Delivering quality service is the cornerstone of every successful business. Start-ups can’t grow into sustainable enterprises without it. Established companies lose market share when service levels drop. The need for a good customer experience is well known and easy to declare. Identifying the specific characteristics required to meet people’s expectations is much harder and changes over time.

Customer service demands are very different today. Making everything as easy as possible is replacing the over-the-top exceptional experience that drove sales and loyalty a few years ago. Our digital world robs people of time, making a quick and easy shopping experience a luxury. It also makes delivering quality service more efficient and effective.

When you add the ability to provide on-demand information via social media to the self-service shopping preferences of today’s consumers, you get an economical way to provide exceptional service. A study by the Corporate Executive Board of more than 75,000 people who had contacted B2C and B2B call centers found that 57% looked for answers on the website before calling the company. Imagine how having the right answers easily accessible for self-service individuals would affect your bottom line. Even if it only reduced calls by 20%, wouldn’t it be a significant impact?

What if providing answers online also increased sales and customer acquisition?

The lines between customer care and marketing are blurring. Answers that solve problems and link to products and/or services drive sales. Companies that recognize this and use all available tools and channels to provide readily accessible information have a competitive advantage.

The best customer service begins with managing expectations. Providing policy information in an easy to read and understand format establishes boundaries. Always give your business a little wiggle room because things happen. For example, if orders generally arrive at the customer’s address in 3-5 business days, state that orders arrive in 4-7 business days. People are pleasantly surprised when they arrive early and you have some extra time if there is a problem.

Transactional emails reaffirm the expectations established during the shopping stage. Customers should never have to wonder if orders or messages have been received and when items or responses will be received. Providing confirmation and setting expectations in advance significantly reduces questions and queries. Send updates as soon as possible if challenges arise that change the information provided.

Most people (as in 99.99999999999%) don’t want to discuss their private business on a public forum. If customer expectations are clearly defined and follow up communication is good, your social pages won’t receive posts concerning specific order information or complaints. There may be the occasional private message, but baring catastrophic operational failure your customers won’t use social sites to resolve in-house service issues.

How is customer service a pillar of social media?

Quality service solves problems. When people think of corporate customer service, transactional issues usually pop in their mind. They forget that the products and services offered by companies solve problems. The types of problems vary, but the reality remains that demand is driven by the need to solve problems. This is where social media is a valuable service and marketing channel. It allows you to show customers and prospects how your company can solve their problems.

For example, if your business sells parts, providing how to troubleshoot videos with links to the appropriate items is a service. Even better, create how to install the parts videos and include link information in every outgoing order for those items. Use good keywords to attract natural search and links to additional information for buying. It serves prospects trying to resolve issues and helps customers insure they are doing it right. The results are more sales and fewer calls.

Naturally it takes time and effort to reformat and upload all of the information you have available. The reward makes it worth your while because social sites become members of your sales and service teams. If it is done right the first time, there is minimal maintenance and long term benefits from providing digital customer service.

Keeping customers actively buying products and services is a key component of every marketing and service strategy. The longer people remain in the buying funnel, the greater their lifetime value and contribution to corporate profitability. People can easily shift loyalties with a click of a button in our global marketplace. This makes it much harder to keep them actively engaged and committed to your business.

Companies with storefront are better equipped to keep customers because they have the opportunity to build face-to-face relationships. Ask anyone who is extremely loyal to a brand why they love it so and invariably you’ll receive a response similar to these: “The products/service is amazing.” or “Ben always takes good care of me.”

When people have good relationships with individuals within an organization, they are more loyal.

Amazing products and services contribute to loyalty but there is always another option available. If not today, rest assured that someone is working on one to replace your best sellers. The only way to guarantee a loyal customer base is to create unbreakable bonds. This is done one person at a time.

Pure play direct marketing and ecommerce companies are at a disadvantage when competing with bricks and mortar organizations. Creating bonds with individuals is much harder when transactions are handled electronically. Social media changes the playing field because it provides a venue for the one-to-one connections that create unbreakable bonds.

Capitalizing on this opportunity requires a strategic plan that includes connecting with customers across channels. The plan must include building a community of customers. Companies are investing too much money in the hopes of launching viral campaigns. Connecting with customers delivers a better return on investment. To get started, replace passive links to social media networks with aggressive campaigns that invite customers to join your communities and reward them for doing so.

Connecting with customers takes more effort and time to build your communities than typical social media acquisition strategies.

The rewards are greater too. When customers are the foundation of your community, they help you answer questions, introduce new people to your business, and respond better to your promotions. People who are actively participating in brand communities have longer customer lifespans and higher lifetime values. And, one more thing…they look forward to your marketing messages instead of complaining about them.

Creating a successful integrated marketing strategy is a necessity in our multichannel marketplace. Silo management of marketing channels wastes resources and reduces results. The days are gone where dominating one or two channels was enough to grab market share. Capturing people’s attention requires multi-faceted campaigns that reach them wherever they happen to land.

Understanding your company’s customer and prospect expectations is a necessity when choosing channels and platforms. What works for your competitors may fail your business. You have to know what your target market expects from your organization.

If you haven’t seen much success from your social media participation, it could be that your expectations and activity are misguided. The rules of engagement defined by early adopters rarely deliver measureable results beyond fan and follower acquisition. There are four areas where social media works. In addition to providing opportunities, they provide the reasons companies need to participate.

1. Customer RetentionThe benefits of keeping customers are well known. Social media helps make it happen by offering the opportunity to create one-to-one relationships. Showing people that you value them helps keep them loyal.
2. Customer AcquisitionA community filled with happy customers attracts prospects. As noted in Social Casual vs. Direct Qualified Prospects, social media doesn’t work very well as a stand-alone prospecting tool. But when you use it for customer retention and service, acquisition is a secondary benefit.
3. Customer ServiceProviding quality service requires companies to answer questions before they are asked. When this is done well, service calls are reduced and marketing is easier. Use social media to share “how to”, “what happens when”, and troubleshooting information.
4. SEOUsing good keywords and links in social media posts improves search results. Social search often receives higher page rankings than traditional sources. When posting updates use keywords and links so that people find your business even when they don’t participate in social media.

Direct sales is missing from this list because revenue generated from social media is a secondary benefit for most companies. There are rare occasions where corporate income is directly attributable to social activity but this is an exception. If it happens, celebrate. Don’t expect it to be sustainable. Use social media as a relationship building tool so you can reduce service costs and improve loyalty. Sales and profitability will follow.