How to Obtain and Sustain Customers on Social Media

Social media is the trending global market place, where buyers meet sellers. It is therefore imperative especially for entrepreneurs to establish an online presence. There are still some thriving local businesses that are not on social media, such establishments are believed not to be maximizing or utilizing the potential opportunity provided on these platforms to improve product awareness, increase customer base and sales.

I was talking to a friend the other day and she was like “You have good products but you don’t have a good online presence, you cannot fathom the boost that online engagement would bring to your business.” I guessed she was right because she has experienced it firsthand. But then again, I was talking to another friend about the skill I just acquired and how I can start a business with it. What she responded was: “It would be nice to start a business given your new skill but you don’t just get customers easily on Social Media.” She was probably right in saying this because her social media pages look like you landed on Disney themed funfair, I mean that’s how beautiful are pictures look. These are different opinions from two business owners who have a great online presence; but why are they getting different results? Definitely someone is not doing something right. So I made my findings.

Have a solid on-ground presence: True one can promote business through social media, but a business should have its on-ground definition, like identifying the pain points of Prospective customers, and how to solve them. Designed product or service to meet needs, Quality assurance and control, pricing policies, and a well-established SOP (Standard Operating Procedures). Good combination of these makes the online take off easy and itch-free. I believe any organization that can attract and sustain physical customers should find it easy to do the same with online customers.

Product Standardization: Product standard is paramount, when a customer enjoys a product or service by its standard, it is easy to refer.

Branding and Packaging: This is where the power of sight comes in. The eyes and ears are the gateways to the heart, and the heart is where the decisions are made. A customer is halfway into buying a product by its sight or presentation. So it is crucial to perfect the branding to a reasonable extent before launching a product online.

Customer Satisfaction and Review: “The saying that customer is King” is no joke, because they can actually influence the decisions of other customers especially with product reviews. Google play store does that a lot with the apps on their platform. Creating a customer review or testimonial page on your social media is a good way of attracting online customers.

Protecting Projected Image: Image protection is very important to sustain online customers. Simply put- Integrity. Always make good on promises, either on quality or delivery.

The truth is a lot of substandard products or services hide behind the façade of social media image or online presence and neglecting the on-ground presence, if not there will not be issues and images of what I ordered versus what I got. Hilarious as it seems I saw an image on social media on what I ordered versus what I got and thought of how pathetic it is to disrupt long-lasting customer relationships for ephemeral satisfaction. And a lot of customers fall prey to such sub-standard products or services, just because the business owners have a good online presence but a very bad on-ground presence.