Experts suggest that to succeed on social media, you must frequently interact with all your fans, that social media is about one-on-one conversations, and that you need to be personal as far as possible. These facts notwithstanding, big brands really build social media engagement impersonally and quite often successfully.
Brand with 500 fans – regardless of their nature and size – need to adopt the same tactics to build and engage on social media. Scale has got nothing to do with the question of proportion and size.
Imagine you have to build a model of the Empire State Building, and then you have to do it to scale. There are features of the original design you may have to alter to make it work, but once the model is done, it should look identical to the original.
When a small business tries to copy a social media campaign by a big known brand, it may fail because the campaign was not scaled correctly. Big brands can engage with five million people without conversing with every fan. You don’t have to like every post, comment on every picture, or retweet every tweet posted by a big brand.
Your definition of engagement doesn’t change, but how big brands execute engagement does. One feature is exemplary customer service regardless whether you are a brand with 50 fans or 50 million fans. What changes as you grow in size is how you execute/scale that strategy to fit the size of your followers.
You may not be able to personally converse with each of the 50 million followers, but you can put a systems in place to provide prompt responses. Set up an easy-to-find and relevant FAQ page on your website that can address customer’s basic needs.
You may cultivate brand advocates that will help you troubleshoot issues within their reach on social media. Big brands change the methods they use to communicate in social media.
Broadcast is the key approach when sealing with social media. Broadcasting just means to send out messages and scatter them over a large area. Though impersonal, that is the necessary way to communicate with a large audience. Remember you can still broadcast and be personable, creative, receptive, innovative, or adding value. It is possible to broadcast and yet effectively connect.
However, instead of adopting a journalistic style in your communications choose a conversational style. There is a way to make your social media posts personal and connect emotionally to fans, even when you are broadcasting. Another best option is appealing visuals. A picture is worth a thousand words and, if done well, visuals can connect deeply and emotionally.