Wednesday, February 22, 2017

How to Use a Knowledge Base to Grow Your Social Presence

I can’t think of a day when I didn’t check my Facebook, let alone the other social channels like Twitter, Instagram, SnapChat and what not. Social media is not a trend anymore, it has become a habit and a way of life. If we analyze the involvement of social media in our day to day lives, you’ll see that even our conversations have multiple references of it.

“Did you check that article on Facebook?”

“I met this gorgeous woman on Instagram”

There are several more instances when we mention social media in our day to day conversations. It has taken people by storm and now, when we meet somebody who isn’t on social media, we start judging them.

According to the statistics by SimilarWeb, the following are the ten websites and apps with the most web traffic:

 

 

 

As shown above in the images, Facebook tops the chart with Instagram, Twitter, Whatsapp and Snapchat also taking their places in the top 10. This makes it pretty obvious that social media is the greatest stage on virtual web.

So, when it comes to businesses, social media should be a key channel in terms of marketing and engaging audience. Most businesses, whether product or service, have FAQ and help pages for their users. The typical tool to create such help sites is a knowledge base.

As an online repository of information, a knowledge base contains all the relevant information, from FAQs, user guides to help manuals. While businesses devise strategies to engage more people on social media, there is one method which is often overlooked – utilizing a knowledge base in social media tactics.

Here are some benefits of considering a knowledge base as a part of your social presence strategy:

 

Offer relevant content to promote on social channels

Every social media rep understands the value of high quality content on social channels. If the content is not up to the mark, chances of drawing traffic gets slim.  And it is not just about traffic, creating quality content is directly proportional to the conversion rate.

During the conversation audit, a social media representative uses different tools like Radian6 or Meltwater Buzz to mine the data for “product” or “brand” related conversations on the internet. After getting the data, one can find the following key statistics:

  • The platform of conversations (Facebook, Twitter etc.)
  • Nature of conversations
  • Influencer identifications, their community size and so on.
  • Competitors community sizes, reach etc.

After gathering such valuable data, the next step is to engage these channels and people with relevant content. If the content is not providing value or helping people out in anyway, then all the efforts can backfire.

This is where a knowledge base comes handy. Your knowledge base is a repository which consists all the information about your products and brand. For a social rep to coordinate with different teams to get the content can take up a lot of time. So instead, content can be taken from the knowledge base. This will benefit in the following ways:

  • As the content published on knowledge base is well researched and reviewed, it will save time.
  • Content on knowledge base is a contributed repository of a lot of minds in an organization which increases its relevance.

It allows social media reps to offer fresh content on social channels every time without any brainstorming.

 

Create a fun learning experience for customers on social channels

When you are a product/service provider, there will be cases when your customers may not know about your product completely. They may use it for a specific reason and never bother to know more as long as it is serving their primary purpose.

Such customers will never visit your knowledge base to read your perfectly authored user guides and manuals. And as a business owner, understand that the more your customers learn about your product’s functionality, the better are the chances of upselling and future references.

So, what do you do to educate them more about your products?

You bring the knowledge base to them!

Apart from making content relevant, posting KB articles of your products on social can create a learning environment for your customers. This is the same way gamification has done wonders in the learning field. When you create a casual environment to educate people, there is no pressure and people are able to grasp more than they will ever in a studious or disciplined learning environment.

Social media is a place where people come to “chill”. A smart business owner can easily use this “chilled” environment to his advantage. So, when you post KB articles and other information about your products in a fun and interesting way, you can educate your customers indirectly, which has some direct benefits as well:

  • You feed more information about your products to your users, making them realize the true potential of your products.
  • A lot of customers can resolve their queries on social media itself, without having to call your support or even landing on your knowledge base!
  • It makes the life of your social media reps easy as they can have better post scheduling and a more crisp roadmap to follow.

 

Make social channels a credible source for your organization 

I mentioned at the beginning of this post how social media is the biggest stage in the world of virtual web. And because now everybody counts in likes and shares, creating a social presence is very important.

It is as important for a business as it is for that high school kid who wants his first girlfriend but is condemned because there are less likes on his profile picture!

Seriously folks, it may sound exaggerated, but this is the reality of the world we are living in. Social media has that importance now.

So, when a potential prospect wants to do business with you, the chances of him/her checking out your social channels are quite high. If your social presence is not what the prospect thinks it should be then you have lost a potential customer.

When you are posting relevant content, engaging the right people with valuable information and also creating a learning experience on your social channels with the help of a knowledge base then it greatly increases the credibility of your organization.

The more engagement you have on your social channels, the more it looks active, increasing the chance of prospects trusting your organization (or at least giving it a thought). That is enough for conversion. To sum it up here is what you get:

  • Engagements on social channels gives out that you are active.
  • Relevant and valuable content adds to the credibility that you know what you’re doing.
  • It proves that you are a modern organization which glides with the trending strides.

 

Roll out product updates faster to your customers

All the authored wikis, user guides and manuals are saved and published on your knowledge base. So, when you roll out new updates, it gets difficult to let everyone know about them, which increases more tickets and inquiries from customers.

I hope I have stressed enough on the fact that social media is the most active part of the internet. No matter who you are or what you do, I can always spot you scrolling through your Facebook in trains, planes and even while walking.

So apart from a press release about your new updates, if you post those updates from your knowledge base to your social media channels, there more likely to reach to more audience. This also doesn’t put pressure on your customers and audience.

They might be scrolling through their best friend’s wedding photos and if your update comes in between the feed, there is a fair chance of them remembering about it. So, here’s what you get:

  • A faster channel to promote about your updates.
  • Offer the refined well written posts of your knowledge base.
  • Start a discussion and gather feedback on your updates.

 

Final thoughts

Even though there isn’t a direct connection of social media and a knowledge base but if played smartly and right, the above use cases can actually boost social engagements, quality of content and educate your customers.

Have you ever used your knowledge base’s content to help fuel your social media? How did it work for you? Tell us about it in the comments.

The post How to Use a Knowledge Base to Grow Your Social Presence appeared first on GetResponse Blog - Online Marketing Tips.

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