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Ever wondered how well known brands use Facebook to build strong communities of loyal followers? Want to learn if your business needs Facebook? Read this article to discover how Facebook can be a great community building tool for your business:

750 million people are on Facebook. This means 1 out of 10 people on this globe are using Facebook. Great news for your business is that 50% of this Facebook community is active on Facebook every single day!

250 million people take Facebook with them on their mobile devices like iphones, ipads and android phones.

Alexa -a site that monitors web traffic- ranks Facebook the number 2 website in the world. This means that Facebook is the worlds second best web traffic generator. Imagine how doing Facebook right would improve your rankings on search engines like Google and Yahoo!

10.000 websites are integrating Facebook functionality into their website every single day. Think about the Facebook like box or Facebook share buttons. The number of small businesses with a Facebook page is growing every day.

Big brands like Disney, Intuit, Starbucks and Intel all have a Facebook presence.

Are you looking for a way to shift your day-to-day business from a brand-centered way of thinking to a customer-centered way of acting? If so, look no further. This article will reveal how to use social media to show your customers you really value them.

If your organisation wants to become truly customer centric, you need to improve the engagement with the very people who make your business grow! The success of your business depends upon building relationships with your customers. Show your customers that you really value them. Start connecting with them, satisfy their needs and excite them with solutions to their problems.

Social media like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn is taking over from CRM (Customer Relationship Management) in offering more people more ways to voice their opinion, good or bad, about the products and services they have tried. Here are four things to review when improving your customer centricity using social media:

#1 Define how social media fits into your marketing and communication plans

Review all forms of connection with your customers. Think about direct contact via retail outlets, call centres, CRM activities, events and websites, or indirectly through retailers, advertising and market research.

Think about how to integrate social media platforms effectively to engage with your customers. Platforms like Facebook or Twitter offer you the fastest and most personal way to get closer to your customers. Define how social media will fit into your marketing and communications plans. Decide how to complement your other forms of communication and integrate social media seamlessly into them.

#2 Experience where to engage with your target audience

Next you need to choose the most appropriate platform(s) for your target audience. Do they spend most of their time on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube or any other social platform? Start sharing valuable content via different social media channels and monitor the results. Which channels generate the most engagement with the content you share? Don’t expect your own brand pages will attract your customers without engagement on social platforms. A leading CPG company, with which I worked, found that more than two-thirds of their brand websites were being visited by less than 20 people per month!

#3 Listen to what they want to hear

Every connection you make with your customers provides an opportunity for you to also ask questions or provide information back. This is particularly true with social media, where more people are likely to complain or ask questions than elsewhere, at least in developed markets. Although you may not like hearing negative comments about your products and services, it is better to find out and correct the issues quickly, than to discover the problem through falling sales, or worse, comments posted on the internet.

To attract your customers to engage with you in social media, there has to be something in it for them. Therefore it is essential to ask yourself “what do they want to hear?” rather than “what do we want to tell them”. Social media provides an almost instantaneous contact with your customers, which means that you must always be open and ready to respond, they expect it!

#4 Discover when they are most engaged in social media

The real challenge for your business is to discover what time of the day your costumers are most engaged in social media via different channels. If you are doing business on a global scale, you’ll need different teams for each region. Gather smart data on a global and local scale to learn which parts of the day best support your engagement and customer centric behaviour.

What are your thoughts? Do you have questions? Please enter your comments in the box below.