Increase Customer Evangelism With These 4 Social-Savvy Tools

Consumers are now exposed to hundreds, if not thousands, of marketing messages and product advertisements every single day.  Just think about all of the banners running down the side of your favorite website, or all of the billboards you pass on your drive home.  Companies are working harder than ever to pay for our attention, but unfortunately for them, the more cluttered with ads our lives become, the less impact each one has.  We now see so many marketing messages every day that they cease to stand out, and it’s causing marketers to look for another way to get their prospects’ attention.

The Power of Customer Evangelism

Best-selling author and internet marketing sensation Seth Godin popularized the phrase “permission marketing” nearly 15 years ago. Permission marketing recognizes, as Godin puts it, “the new power of the best consumers to ignore marketing.”  Instead of pushing your message on your audience, you want to get permission from them to send them relevant, expected communications.  In Godin’s eyes, if someone is not expecting to hear from you, you don’t have their permission.  So if you have a large following of customers who are eagerly awaiting your next blog post, tweet, product launch or sale, your marketing efforts will be significantly more effective.

While earning your prospects’ and customers’ permission is more challenging and time consuming than buying as many impressions as your marketing budget will allow and hoping that some of them will convert, ultimately it will allow you to spend less money on traffic that converts better, leads to a more harmonious relationship with your customers, and ultimately encourages them to come back and purchase from you again.

Permission marketing is all about trust.  If your customers trust you, then they will give you permission to contact them.  If they don’t, then you need to find a way to gain their trust, and spamming them with mass advertising is not an effective way to accomplish this.

So, how do you earn the trust of your prospects and customers?  One way is to have someone they trust help you get their attention and permission — their friends! Getting your best customers to promote your business to their friends and family allows you to build on the trust they have already established in their own relationships and.

Consumers trust their friends and family more than a sales person or a company’s marketing message. A person’s friends and family have to care for their long-term relationship, which means they won’t lie in order to obtain a short-term gain like a company or sales person might.

Besides having a high degree of trust, friends act as a filter when the number of options available to the customer is overwhelming.  For instance, in the book The Paradox of Choice, author Barry Schwartz explains how presenting too many options to a consumer often becomes an obstacle to closing a sale.  It requires too much brainpower for them to analyze, compare, and rank the myriad choices available, and the prospect simply abandons the process instead of going through the effort required to make to a decision among an overwhelming number of options.  To alleviate the stress caused by this paradox, consumers use their friends as a filter to help them narrow down the possibilities and make it easier for them to come to a decision.

Now that you see the power that leveraging the trust existing customers have with their friends and family can have to help your business acquire new customers, here are four social media tools you can use to accomplish this.

Tools to Get Your Customers Sharing

1. ShareThis

ShareThis is a tool that allows readers to share your content across 45 different social media outlets, including email, Facebook, Digg, and Twitter, and most importantly for you, it eliminates the need to install multiple buttons on your pages.  Just go to http://sharethis.com, select your content management system, and customize the widget based on your preferences.

2. ShareThisPlugin

Not to be confused with the tool mentioned above, ShareThisPlugin is a paid WordPress plugin that allows you to implement “gated content” on your website.  If you’re unfamiliar with the term, “gated content” means that you require visitors to your page to take some kind of action that benefits your company, like sharing a post from your blog on their Facebook page or following your company on Twitter, and in return they get access to premium free material you’ve created.  In other words, you put up a “gate” around your content, and in order to pass through the customer must take some action to help your brand first.  One example is a consulting company allowing people to download their latest white paper for free, in exchange for providing their email address, which allows the company’s sales team to follow up with potential leads.  Another example is a band offering a free track if visitors to the band’s website send out a tweet promoting the band’s new album, which is a perfect example of encouraging customer evangelism using social media tools.

If you don’t want to force people to share your content using ShareThisPlugin, but only want to suggest that they do before giving them access to the free material, you can do that too. A pop-up window will ask the visitor to take the action you request before moving forward to the free content, but allow them to close it and access the material anyway.

3.  Facebook’s Social Plugins

Facebook is the largest social media website in the world, and it’s constantly creating new ways for users to bring content from across the internet into the platform so they can share it with their friends.  For example, facebook provides a range of social plugins for web developers to help them make their site integrate more easily with Facebook.

In order to enable customer evangelism for your business, consider adding a “like” button beside each of your products so viewers can show their support for their favorite items, which will also show up on their friends’ newsfeeds, helping to promote your business.  Another idea is to include a “send” button on the most interesting parts of your site, so that readers can quickly share this content directly with their friends on Facebook.

4. “Click to Tweet”

Click to Tweet enables you to create a button that allows people to share a pre-written tweet on Twitter with two clicks.  The first of the two clicks is selecting the “Click to Tweet” button.  It will open the compose dialog box for the person’s Twitter account, assuming they are logged in already.  You have the option to write pre-loaded message that will automatically show up in the compose window when someone clicks your button if you want.  Users will then be able to enter their tweet into the compose field, or edit the pre-loaded tweet if they want, and then they simply hit send (the second click) and the tweet will be published on their profile.

Just go to http://ClicktoTweet.com, where you will be asked to enter the copy you want to pre-loaded in your tweet (be sure to include a link or your Twitter handle and call to action), and then click “Generate.”  It will produce code that you can easily copy and paste into your website.

At the end of the day, if you want your customers to tell their friends about your business, then you have to make it as easy for them as possible.  These four social media sharing tools are just some of the tools available to help you do just that, and they will enable you to begin building your own team of customer evangelists.

Do you have a favorite social sharing tool?  Tell us about it in the comments below