Follow these steps to learn about your audience, engage with them and boost your social media presence.

Plan

Identify your plans and goals and what you want to achieve. Explore social media avenues before you start posting and ensure you know how to use them correctly. This will show professionalism and competence, which audiences will respond well to.

Q & A

Not gaining the customer relationship you crave? Then interact with your customers and consumers. Set up Q and A sessions where your customers have dedicated time with you to ask queries they may not have had the opportunity to do before. Everyone can use twitter at any time of the day, but actively inviting users to ask questions through a customer-dedicated service, shows a real sense of customer care. If you don’t engage you don’t connect.

But don’t go jumping in unprepared. Plan your Q & As with a list of topics to inspire Twitter users. Research current trends and themes related to your industry, so when conversations hit a lull you can re-engage with your audience.

So how will people know about your live Q & A? Create an engaging hashtag and promote the events throughout your social media activities. A little £Spend can go a long way on social media.

Ask questions

So you'’ve approached your customers on Twitter to propose questions in a live Q & A session. What’s next? Now it’s time for you to ask the questions. Get potential customers excited about your product and find out what makes your customers tick. Unsure what to ask? Well, for example, if you’re a company that produces desserts, ask people’s preferences over their desired dessert and what inspires their sweet tooth.

Tweet your blogs

With just 140 characters there’s not a lot you can get across to your followers. A way to get around this is blogging about a certain topic and asking an engaging question including the link to your blog. The question draws people in and encourages them to click the link, which in turn drives traffic to your website.

You are not a robot

Although social media is a faceless process, it doesn’t mean that you can’t show your humanity. Write as if you are talking, (to a certain extent!) and interact naturally. Yes people are paid to sit at a desk and tweet, but your audience will be clued up, and they’ll know the genuine tweets to respond to and the pre-generated ones to ignore.

Are you visible

A fairly simple one, but how visible are your social media icons? If your social links are not easy to find on your website, then chances are people won’t hunt you down directly on social media. Make it easy for people to find you by creating easy-to-see icons on your website. Not only your website, but your email signatures too. It’s just another easy way to create links to your business.

Know your audience

You should research your audience before beginning a social media campaign. Find who your key target audience is, see what interests they have, follow them and begin to tweet and post about activities that will interest them.

Respond quickly

If you receive a complaint via social media, the best action is to respond quickly. It shows great customer service. Also, potential customers will pick up on this and see that you value your customers.

Have a strategy

Create a marketing calendar outlining your key industry dates. Make it open and visible to your employees to enable them to add in information and mark important business dates.

Write content that will interest them

Don’t write what interests you; write what will interest your customers. Publish articles and blogs from your website that will entice them to click again and again. Also, it’s important to remember that your business copy not only interest your followers, but benefit them, too.

Here at Absolute we created the Magento Wheel of Fortune, an interactive game which reveals 12 expert tips to help to improve the overall performance and loading speed of a Magento store during peak seasons.

From server tips to Magento extensions, the Magento wheel benefits online store owners and Magento developers worldwide. The interactive wheel was liked and shared across the Magento community, reaching as far as the USA and Croatia, by some of the biggest Magento companies in the world.

This type of big outreach content, which was created in-house by Absolute’s creative team, gave our followers real content that they could benefit from.

Social media was the biggest driver to the Magento Wheel of Fortune outreach piece, with over 50% of its overall traffic coming from social media sites. Also, the time spent visiting the Magento wheel page averaged highest via social media, at 4 minutes 30 seconds per click, proving a well-targeted campaign.

If you have yet to spin the Magento Wheel of Fortune, click on the image below: