We’ve all read books or stumbled on to what seemed to be a great web site only to close the cover or our browser and find another topic. Why? Because the content, the story, what we were reading, just didn’t grab us or deliver on our expectations.
It’s not terribly different with social media. If the tweet or the post doesn’t resonate, readers/fans won’t like it or retweet it and eventually, they may stop reading that author altogether. This is one of the major things that makes our roles as social media managers—whether as part of a bigger job or as a dedicated gig—the most challenging, finding what our audience—our customer—will respond to, today, tomorrow and next week.
Ultimately though, it doesn’t have to be that hard, and we can always benefit from experimentation and refinement. Few companies enjoy the luxury of enough budget to do deep customer research, but customer research doesn’t have to be extensive or expensive. One of the very best ways to find out who your customer is and what their pain points are and what they’re asking for is your sales team and/or account managers. If you don’t have the resources to do customer research, identify a few sales folks to sit down with you, even once a month, and tell you what they’re hearing in the “customersphere.”
You can also—and always should—curate content from other sources, including:
- Industry news
- Your own company news and announcements
- Company press releases and third-party coverage
- Relevant Symantec information, including product updates
- Fun/interesting posts from others
Since most of our customers are using Symantec products, consider product tips or knowledgebase articles, product updates, new releases, information on trainings and webinars. Talk about your own new services and offerings and updates to existing offerings, share trends that might affect your customers’ businesses and technical environments. And by all means, share your own insights—after all it’s about being social.
If you have time and resources, consider creating your own assets, such as:
- Infographics
- Photos
- Slideshares
- White papers
- Blog posts
If you don’t have time and resources, find a source or sources whose social resources are relevant to your customers and share or retweet those. And watch the competition. Seeing what others are doing and how well their own audiences receive what they’re doing can give you good ideas for what you might try on your own channels.
At the end of the day, experiment and experiment some more. Once you find the right mix of content for your audience, you’ll see increased engagement and know you’re on the right track.
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See the complete Symantec Partner Social Media Series.