Posts tagged user engagement
3 things I have learned working for NERD Beverage
If you have checked out my resume or about me, then you know that I do social media and community management for NERD Beverage Corp. I started working for them Spring 2009 after I helped an employee at the time with twitter and Facebook.
It has been a very valuable experience and has taught me three main things about social media, consumers, and uses for twitter and Facebook.
1. Users like regular chatter and daily conversation.
This may go as a no-brainer, but some companies misuse Facebook and twitter. Some companies ‘fire hose’ daily deals, product info, and marketing adverts without any real interaction with customers.
At NERD, I really like sitting down in front of the computer and engaging our small but active customer base online. I use Facebook as a way to not only leverage deals and product info, but as a feedback forum to receive input on places to sell, which places need to be restocked, and to see what sparks people to buy NERD.
2. Facebook and twitter contests are huge hits.
When I started receiving a ‘product budget’ with NERD, I quickly jumped on Facebook and posted
The first two people who post a picture of them studying while drinking a NERD receive free 4-packs of their choice!
Within three minutes we had five pictures submitted and have now done this little contest weekly. It also gives us free photos of customers using NERD to use on our website, which is a huge plus!
Another contest, and much more overdone in the twitter world, was a ‘retweet this’ contest where we took all the names of the people who retweeted a special post we made and put them into a random name selector generator. We had over 100 people participate and it gained us a good amount of followers on twitter.
3. There are no days off with social media.
Probably the biggest thing I am learning is that you really can’t take a day off from social media. When I first started my manager had me working just Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. After awhile I started noticing each Tuesday I would have to work hard to wake up the few people we had following us instead of continuing conversations and working on gaining new fans/followers.
Therefore I told her I would work everyday. Should have asked for a pay increase but I just love the work!
So the key to good social media is engaging users, not flooding them. You have to also make sure that you do so on a daily basis to keep conversations refreshed and to really garner attention, offer promo items or product giveaways to entice users to spread your company or product by word of mouth!
