Engaging with customers in social media is not enough to achieve great results. We recommend following a well defined and executed social media engagement process to properly take advantage of social media. This engagement process should be part of any social media strategy and will help you find the results you desire from social media.

This 5 step process is used by organizations of all sizes to engage with people through social media.

1. DEFINE

The first step in a social media engagement process is to define your key goals from social media. These goals could include engagement with customers, increased sales, improved customer satisfaction, or elicit product feedback.

2. LISTEN

Customers in social media expect you to listen to them. A foundation of social media engagement is creating a great plan to listen to your customers. There are some great channels in social media to listen to your clients from social networking platforms such as Facebook or Twitter, discussion forums, product review sites, support forums, web surveys, and call centers. To succeed in social media, you need to develop a way to listen to your customers through social media.

3. ORGANIZE

Aligning your organization for social media success will be harder than you anticipate. If you work for a large organization, bureaucracy can sink your efforts, if you work for a smaller firm, lack of resources can become a major problem. No matter what the size or makeup of your organization, you need to align your resources to your social media plan to be successful.

4. ENGAGE

Companies that are consistent in how they engage in social media produce the best results. You need to be consistent in how you respond to customer discussions, complaints, and suggestions. Listening to customers and responding appropriately is the goal of this process. You can also engage with customers to help empower them to promote your business online in a positive manner.

5. MEASURE

As with any good business process, we need to identify how to measure results in order to refine our social media engagement process. In this step, we should define key metrics we will measure and use to determine if the process is working. This could be fan growth, customer interactions, website referrals, or reduced customer service calls. Measuring our social media engagement will also demonstrate how important this is to our marketing efforts in social media.

This clear approach to executing social media to engage with your customers and stakeholders will help you find great success in social media.