1. 10 Essential Elements of Social Media Engagement
Connecting with your customers and potential customers via social media is a wonderful way to
increase your company’s business. The fact of the matter is that consumers are turning toward
social media in droves, and relying on it more and more for consumer advice. If you want to
stay ahead of the game, you need to engage customers via social media.
Yet, it’s easy to spend a lot of time with social media trying to engage customers, only to find
that you’re not making much headway. There are some essential elements and principles you
need to apply if you’re going to make effective use of your social media engagement:
1. Avoid favoritism. Realize that the A-listers aren’t necessarily your best audience. The rest
of the list – the long tail – can have an enormous impact on their audience. Don’t spend all of
your time trying to get the attention of the big guys at the expense of the little guys.
2. Respect others’ time. When someone engages you, respond within a reasonable amount of
time. If it’s during business hours, do it with 60 minutes. If it’s during the evenings or on the
weekends, do it at the next available opportunity. No matter who it is, respond in a timely

2. manner. Even if they’re not a core customer, it demonstrates your respect to other customers
and other potential customers.
3. Keep it professional. Your tweets, Facebook status updates and your blog posts are all
public. Realize, though, that your direct messages, private messages, chats, and emails can all
become public with a simple cut and paste. Proceed as if everything you post to social media
could one day wind up in the newspaper. Avoid using coarse language, and keep things PG-13
and family friendly.
4. Keep it friendly. Avoid the temptation to get into flame wars or contests of spite with your
detractors. Clearly address any legitimate accusations, but don’t make it personal. Don’t run
someone else down, and don’t use harsh tones or harsh words with anyone in your social
media presence. The whole point of social networking is to show potential customers that they
have a friend in your company.
5. Keep social media conversations online. At some point, you’re going to need to exchange
more information – such as when the customer makes a purchase. Keep as much of the rest of
the interaction in public, so you can demonstrate to others how you treat your customers. This
in itself is a wonderful way to promote branding, as well as turn customers into real product
evangelists.
6. Be generous and responsive in your online customer support. Even if you wouldn’t
normally replace a defective product after warranty, consider doing so when asked in the social
media space. If you have a high rate of product failure, however, this won’t work as you’ll have
people crawling out of the woodwork. Of course, if that’s the case, you’ve got more important
problems with your business to worry about than your social media presence.
7. Be chatty. Engage your customers. Social media isn’t some call center where you need to
rush people off the phone in order to meet your call statistics. Take the time to build the
rapport you need to build, and it will pay off in the long run.
8. Don’t drop the ball. When someone asks you a question, give them the answer they need.
Don’t just give them a link. Don’t send them to someone else’s Facebook page. Walk them
through the process, step-by-step. Use each query as an opportunity to teach the asker. This
helps to build your overall rapport and trust with onlookers, for example.
9. Remember that everyone else is living their own life. Sometimes, people get grumpy and
snappy. The social media space is no different. Recognize that, even when someone complains
about your company, it’s not a personal attack. Be kind, patient, generous, responsive and just
overall friendly.

3. 10. Be authentic. You need to really engage with your customers. This makes outsourcing the
social media space hard. That’s not to say it can’t be done, just that it has to be done by
someone who has a vested interest in your company, who’s intimately familiar with your
business ideals, and who’s willing to go the extra mile and establish real customer relationships.
Engaging customers in the social media space means reaching out, making yourself available,
and recognizing that you’re always being watched by countless potential customers to see how
exactly you’re going to act.