Social traffic is going to be more important in the coming years. The vast majority of online marketing experts know that social networking sites are the foundation of traffic, and it’s only going to get more important from here on out. If you’re looking to get more social media traffic for your blog, product or website you need to keep your audience interested and involved. Knowing your audience is the key to social media success.

What interests your audience?

Social media is all about connections. Your Tweets and Facebook updates are nested in with your audience’s best friend, their family members and their other interests. In order for your content to stand out, you have to speak directly to what interests them. You’re already halfway there – they are following you. But if you want them to comment, retweet or click on your links, you’ll have to do more than talk about your company and yourself.

It all starts with understanding their interests. Your audience didn’t join your Facebook group on weight loss in order to be sold to time and time again. They want information on weight loss – from tips to recipes to insights. They want to see information on a regular basis from you about these topics – not about your product.

So ask yourself – what interests your audience? What do they want to know? If you can pinpoint these topics, you’ll be able to create content that really speaks to them.

Making the most of your social media content

Once you’ve determined what your audience is interested in, you can use a variety of different ways to create and display your social media content. One of the great things about social media is that it can take many different forms. You’re no longer limited to standard sized blog posts or articles. You can create tweets, have graphics made, use video content and more to attract attention on the social networks. Here are just of few of the ways you can make the most of social media content:

Create a survey – Since it is all about interaction, surveys are a natural fit. The survey serves double duty. It allows you to interact with your audience, but it also gives you valuable information about your market that you can use later on.

Create a series of quick tips – Quick tips are great for social media marketing because they are bite sized chunks of information that can be used by your audience right away. Have a series of 10 to 20 tips that you can use as Tweets and status updates to interact with your followers.

Use multimedia – Graphics and videos are a lot more eye-catching than written content. Try to look for ways to express the information through multi-media and you’ll see an increased response to what you have to offer.

By keeping your audience in mind and focusing on creating interesting social media content, you can get increased traffic and more sales for your online business.

Most businesses have a one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to social-media marketing. After all, they want prospects! It’s all about sales! So they push their product or service, send out every press release they can and almost every post they make is about them. This is a sure-fire, push-them-away formula for failure. However, if you WANT to make it all about your company, one way to kill three birds with one stone is to do a customer-service strategy, instead.

A customer-service approach to social media will deliver three benefits:

1. Lower your administrative costs

2. Provide customer service in plain view, which is great PR

3. Generate leads and increase sales

Let’s take a look how this would happen.

Lowering Your Administrative Costs

As your company grows, it will learn that the after-sales service is the most important aspect of the sales cycle. It will retain happy customers and happy customers will bring NEW customers. However, this often means more phones, more people to answer the phones, more computers, repeated issues to handle (because the previous customer does not know the next customer, to tell him or her how to rectify the same problem). It all adds to higher costs and a lower bottom line.

However, if you had a customer-service social-media presence, you could handle issues in plain view. Imagine being able to list the top 5 or 10 issues/misunderstandings with links to your website where they can download bug fixes, whitepapers with step-by-step instructions, tutorials, videos, etc. This would drive traffic to your website, adds value, helps SEO and then your well-designed site will pull them in to other offerings you have.

This would mean fewer employees answering phones and the infrastructure needed to support them. You can either hire fewer people or use them to raise productivity in other areas of operation.

Lenovo uses this strategy and in an article in Forrester titled, Case Study #2: How Lenovo Implemented Customer Service Social Media Best Practices, it states:

“This alignment lead to a 20% decrease in laptop service call volumes, an increase in customer service agent productivity, a shortened product problem-resolution cycle and an increase their Net Promoter Scores. The net-net is.. a reduction in customer service support costs and an increase in sales!”

Great Public Relations

Now that you have your client’s attention, they are not only getting the answers they need for a satisfying experience; but others who don’t need an answer are seeing how you care for your customers, interact with them and that many of the issues are NOT faulty products, but unknowledgeable end users. This not only elevates your product’s value, but your image as well.

Generating Leads and Increasing Sales

Keep in mind that those looking from the outside in, seeing your interactions and caring service are your future customers! One of the biggest reasons people buy from any given company is trust and credibility. Either trust in you, or someone they trust who recommended you.

Well, do you think if they are in the market for your product, after seeing how you wonderfully handled other customers, made resources available and even notified them of upcoming releases that they would not feel comfortable buying from you? Of course they would! Moreover, it would shorten the sales cycle, because they will have come to understand your product and service, and you will have built a trust factor that leaves only two concerns to handle: price and availability – and maybe color.

Now this doesn’t mean you don’t have to blog. Your blog will further increase your messages clarity and reach. After all, your customers know others who have the same needs; hence if one has an issue and your blog answers it, they will typically forward your blog to them and you have now been referred. So keep the blog going and make it entertaining, helpful and informative – the social-media trifecta magnet!

Oh, and one last thing, make sure your website is ready for prime-time. Nothing will kill this strategy faster than a website that is ugly or ill designed for a pleasing customer experience. Remember, they’re not getting the resources in social media, they’re being redirected to your website FROM social media. So make sure when they get there that they will want to stay awhile.