Interacting with Your Audience on Social Media – Dos & Don’ts

Interacting with Your Audience on Social Media
Interacting with Your Audience on Social Media

A recent article at Upwork notes that, “depending on your specific industry, if your company does business in the U.S., it’s likely that between 70 and 90 percent of your customers are on social media.” As business authors and entrepreneurs, readers of your book and your clients are also using social media. So it’s important for you to interact with your audience on social media.

Sometimes though things can get “ugly” on social media – and this can impact your reputation negatively. Here are some tips on how to interact with your audience on social media and avoid the “ugly”.

  • Start a conversation. Ask questions to engage your audience. If you see someone else’s post that is of interest to you and your audience, respond directly to that post and start conversing with people.
  • Reply to comments and messages from followers and fans on Twitter and Facebook. Your audience needs to know you are listening to them and any concerns they have. If you do not reply, they will go away – and may take other fans with them.
  • Respond promptly. This is especially important if your audience has a concern they need addressed. If they have sent you a message via social media about a potential problem in your business, ignoring it won’t make it go away. In this fast-paced world, you need to respond as quickly as possible to keep your audience engaged.
  • Ask for feedback. A great way to keep your audience engaged is to ask for their feedback – on a particular product or service, what they’d like to see from you next, what problems or concerns they have, etc. This is the part where it could get “ugly” – so be careful. If you get some negative feedback, don’t use social media to retaliate! This leads to my next tip:
  • Take it offline. That’s right – it may be time to take the conversation offline, away from social media, and make a personal connection with a personal message, phone call or email. Find a way to connect with the individual who has a problem and resolve the issue as quickly as possible – in a way that makes them happy. This is turn can lead to the next tip:
  • Share the feedback. Once you have a happy client, now is the time to share that positive feedback resulting from how you handled the situation quickly and in a way that led to a win/win. 

Interacting on social media can be a lot of fun. It doesn’t have to take a lot of time either. Plan to spend even 10 minutes a day on Twitter – start a conversation, reply to a comment, ask a question, share a fun story! Do something! You may be surprised where it leads.