Let’s face it, in social media, everyone’s vying for your customers’ attention. So how do you make your brand stand out from the rest? The key is to be enchanting! Today, I’m sharing five tips you can implement to make your brand more enchanting.

5 Super Simple Tips to Make Your Brand More Enchanting

1. Cultivate a Little Personality

We’ve all seen it, brands dedicated to pushing content and not much more. Instead of solely pushing out your message, which makes a brand boring, pitchy, predictable, unapproachable, and absolutely uninspiring – aim to convey personality and authenticity with every interaction. If the people behind your brand are smiling, your community should feel it.

It’s social! You’re having a conversation, so don’t bore people. Your unique presence and personality will separate you from your competitors. What do you want people to remember most about your brand?

2. Respond Promptly

Today, no one wants to wait in a phone queue. Customers are turning to social because of its instant nature. Therefore, it’s not enough for your brand to engage. You’ve got to be quick about it. Gone are the days of getting back to your clients in 24 hours. We’re all impatient and our attention spans are getting shorter.

Therefore, you’ve got to make every effort to get back to customers and potential customers within the hour — even if that reply can only be, “We’re working on it and should have an answer shortly.” Never let your community feel ignored.

3. Engage and Be Inclusive

I’m a big believer in being inclusive vs. exclusive when it comes to brand communities. You should interact and engage with as many people as appropriate, treating them all as equals. Treat the new name reaching out to your brand as kindly and expeditiously as you would the well-known influencer. Remember how you felt the first time a big brand took you seriously. Make everybody feel valued and appreciated.

4. Set Expectations

Don’t leave your customers or your community guessing. Set expectations for things like who will be responding and when. No one wants to guess if their question is going to be answered now or tomorrow when you’re back in the office. Publish the hours you’re actively engaging on each of your channels and who will be responding. This gives your customers and your community clear information on when you’re online and they’ll be pleased to know that they can count on you to be there when they reach out.

5. Use Different Forms of Media

Did you know there are at least seven different learning styles? Text alone isn’t going to cut it for everyone. Think about your customers and their different learning styles and how you’ll incorporate these different styles into your social strategy to help make your brand more enchanting to a wider audience.

You can create videos on YouTube, conduct video chats on Zoom, Skype, and even FacetTime, host webinars and create podcasts so that everyone in your community can get to know your brand (and your team) in the way that feels the most comfortable to them. Added bonus, chatting with people face-to-face (even if it’s across the social web) connects you on a deeper level than just Tweeting or emailing.

Are you using any of these methods to wow and amaze your customers and community? What would you add to this list? Let me know in the comments below or Tweet me @Dayngr.

 

The best part of social media is being social. So don’t limit yourself to being social only on the web; nurture your connections by taking them offline. Today, I’m giving you 3 tips for keeping the social in social media. 

1. Help Connect

It’s not just about your product, brand, or organization now that the conversations have kicked off and you’ve made all these amazing connections. The people you’ve been communicating, interacting, and engaging with really need to connect with each other, too. Events are really important for community building. Create meetups, tweetups and other offline events to get your community together and interacting – not just with your brand, but with each other. Facilitate introductions to help others get connected, and build their networks both online and off.

2. It’s All About Relationships

Think of social networking the same way you think of networking offline. It’s all about relationships. People want to do business with people they know, and support the people they like. Make time on your social calendar for attending industry events. That will provide an opportunity to meet your followers one-on-one, reconnect with clients, meet new prospects, and deepen your relationships within your community. The personal connections you make at these events will also help drive referrals to your social media channels and corporate website.

Platforms like Eventbrite (see: others like Eventbrite) can help you find and share events to attend. Don’t stop there though. Let your community know where and when they can find you, by sharing this information on your website and in your blog.

3. Close the Circle

Once you get back to the office, be sure to close the circle with all those great people you’ve met. Let them know it was great to meet them and thank them for chatting with you. Also, take a moment to think about projects you can work on collaboratively. When you genuinely take an interest in what others in your online community have going on, they’ll be more inclined to check in and see what you’ve got going on as well. Real connections help you to feel more invested in people’s projects.

Cement these relationships by meeting routinely. If you’re bound by geographic restrictions, pick up the phone (or use FaceTime, Zoom or Skype) and connect. Face-to-face connections are wonderful, but when that isn’t practical, hearing someone’s voice is the next best thing.

Do you connect offline with the people you met online? What’s one simple step you would add to help keep the social in social media? Let me know in the comments below.

If you’re new to social media, you’re probably wondering what the heck hashtags are and do I use them effectively. You’re in luck! In this blog post, I’m going to cover those questions and so much more!

What The Heck Are Hashtags?

Hashtags assign topics to your posts, status updates, and articles. Using the pound sign # {or hash} on a social network {think Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+ and even Facebook}, turns any word or group of words that directly follow it, into a searchable link, allowing you to organize content and track discussion topics based on those keywords. That means, if you wanted to post about your visit to NYC like I did above, you would include #NYC in your status update to join the conversation. Click on any hashtag to see all the posts that mention that topic/subject in real-time.

How to Format Your Hashtags

The first thing you should know is that you don’t want to use spaces – even if your hashtag contains multiple words. But you do want to differentiate those words by using upper and lower case. For example, Pen Island would look better, and make much more sense, as #PenIsland than as #penisland, don’t you agree?  Uppercase letters won’t alter your search results so people searching for #abc will get the same results as people searching for #ABC.

Numbers are supported, so #EasyAs123 works. Sadly, punctuation marks are not supported. So commas, periods, exclamation points, question marks, and apostrophes are out. While you’re at it, skip asterisks, ampersands and any other special characters.

There Are No Presets

There isn’t a master list of hashtags, but you can search your social networks {and search engines} to see if there’s a hashtag already in use for a particular subject or topic. You can even check services like HashAtIt, Hashtagify, and Hashtags.org. Remember, every time you add a hashtag in front of a word or phrase, you’re creating a hashtag. Try it out!

How You Can Use Hashtags

Hashtags are supported on Twitter {where they started}, Instagram, Pinterest, and even Facebook, now. There are so many different ways you can use hashtags, the possibilities are almost endless. However, I wanted to give you a few ways you can use them, along with a few tips.

• Don’t forget, hashtags turn words into searchable links
• Always start with a # and leave out spaces
• Use upper and lowercase to differentiate words
• Use them during conferences and events
• Use them in conversations around specific topics
• Use them for Twitter Chats
• Use them during television shows (#CNN, #GreysAnatomy, #JurassicWorld)
• Hashtags can be used anywhere within your post or update
• Use them to find like-minded individuals
• Use them to find people discussing the topics you’re interested in
• Use them to create a following for your brand/blog/business
• Use them to complement photos you share on Instagram (This helps you discover new accounts and pick up followers)
• Use them to show off your personality, brand voice or tone
• Use them for fun!

Again, these are just a few ways you can use hashtags while you’re using social media. What would you add to this article to help people trying to understand hashtags? How are you using hashtags? Let me know in the comments below!