Broadening your social horizons to reach new heights

21 Aug 2015

It seems quite ridiculous to talk about how being sociable is key to a good customer relationship management model, but sometimes it is good to discuss the obvious.

If your customers feel like you are interested in their lives and that you are easily contactable, they are much more likely to feel like they can approach your team and communicate their needs effectively from the word go.

We often talk about the key word central to CRM – relationships – but where do these relationships begin?

Traditionally, a relationship with a customer would begin at a convention, a spontaneous meeting in a lift, or perhaps when a sales person picks up the phone and calls a number from a database. These days, a customer journey may start from a much more subtle source – perhaps a shared post or comment on a Pinterest board, Facebook wall, Twitter feed, YouTube advert or Instagram image. With all these ways of reaching your audience, broadening your company’s social horizons couldn’t be more important or easier.

With all of this in mind, I am very excited to let you know how the team here at OpenCRM are becoming more socially active.

We have some brand new social media accounts which we will be using to help support our existing customer base, interact with the general public and overall show off to the social world how we are a lovely bunch of cultured, opinionated and interesting folk. It was only a matter of time before we were going to become rooted in the evergreen tree of social growth that is social media. Why not come and grow with us? We’d like to interact with you and see what heights we can climb to together.

Now we are socially engaged, lets have a look at the different sides of the social campaigning coin. One thing you do did need to keep in mind when embarking on new social adventures is the potential risks that social media brings. It’s no good jumping head first into a social media campaign without a clear strategy and awareness of what you are doing. Each social media account needs to be managed and it’s important that, for each platform, you consider what issues might occur and how you would deal with these productively and transparently.

It seems that content is always key and so is quality over quantity (in most cases). Don’t flood your social feeds with irrelevant posts that don’t represent your company. Also, bear in mind that although something is relevant to your company’s ethos or another area within, it may not be of interest to your target audience; so it might dilute the message you are trying to convey. A good, well-planned balance of factual feature based posts and interactive insights that show your social circles your intelligent perspective and personality, should work a treat.

Once you have your social platforms nicely established and you content has a clear direction, you then need to think about how you will start to expand your social presence. Well, this bit should be easy. I tend to think of social media as an excellent environment for a company’s social seeds to grow. If you think of your company’s social presence as a newly planted tree, as long as the roots are well established, and you feed the young saplings with enough good nutrients and water (content), then your tree will grow exponentially and bloom for years to come.

When your followers share your publications to their surrounding social circles, your audience will expand in all directions and your company message will be carried through to the masses. If your posts are interesting, people will interact with them and share them, it’s that simple.

I’d like to invite you to like us on our shiny new Facebook account or start to follow us on our handy support Twitter account @helpcrm.

Or, if you would like to see what we are up to as a company, we have a Pinterest, Instagram and Google+ account which you may like to check out.