Page 296 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

impacting brand and purchasing decisions in your category. Whether they be
expert, referent, or positional influencers, you may want to consider organizing
programs that address them directly.

Some of these can be real-world events, too. Insurance companies put a lot of
effort into developing relationships with parents of new drivers because they
know they heavily impact the first car purchase. And because parents are always
concerned about the well-being of their children, they’re more likely to push for
better auto insurance. One service that you can use to create those events is
Meetup (www.meetup.com), which enables companies to connect with local com-
munities around their products or categories.

Treating your stores as cafés

Bookstores such as Barnes & Noble have blurred the lines between their physical
stores and their online storefront. You can buy books online and return them in
the store. You can get notifications about in-store events in your neighborhood
through email, and customers can look up books online while they’re in the stores.
They also organize readings and book clubs and encourage customers to bring
their friends to them and promote the events online, too. Online or offline, these
bookstores don’t care: They encourage deeper interaction and encourage custom-
ers to bring their social influencers with them at every stage.

Putting Twitter on the big screen

Twitter is the twelfth online social media site in 2019 ranked by number of users
(https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-
ranked-by-number-of-users/).

The follow-follower dynamic and the 280-character limit lend themselves to fre-
quent, short bursts of communication. Consider promoting your Twitter account
in your physical stores. Or better still, have you considered having a live Twitter
stream on a screen in each of your stores to show customers how you’re answer-
ing the queries of others, responding to problems, promoting specific products,
and deepening relationships with your community? Call it the Twitter influence,
but the way in which you’re interacting with your other customers on the social
platforms can strongly influence a customer to purchase from you as well. Don’t
miss that opportunity.

One great tool that you can use to accomplish an impressive display of posts is
Tint by Filestack (http://www.tintup.com). You choose what to display — for
example brand posts or a specific hashtag, and let it run. This tool is great for
events to encourage attendees to spread the word.

280 PART 4 Getting Your Message to Connectors