3 ways to use social media for loyalty programs

3.48 billion social media users all over the world – put it simply, 45% of the total worldwide population is using social networks. The advance of social media connects the whole world and businesses obviously don’t set them out of the trend. 

A loyalty program and social media revolve around each other like yin and yang. A reward program is a great way to strengthen customer base; however, it cannot achieve the mission without being given a spotlight on it. This is where social media comes in. 

Here are 3 ways your loyalty programs can take advantage of social media to enhance its reach and engagement:

1. Combine social media actions to the loyalty program

With a huge number of social media users, incorporating social media actions to the rewards program is one of the quickest and easiest ways to maximize its effectiveness. By encouraging people to share your post/ product on social media, refer a friend or leave feedback, you create channels to communicate with your customers. As a vehicle of communication, social media is all about building emotional relationships; and including social media actions would mean generating customers’ emotions towards your business activities.

Moreover, earning something from the network they are active in gives people the feeling of attainability. Despite its virtual platform, the value both customers and brands get is real. A sense of accomplishment increases the possibility of them participating in your program.

Besides higher engagement rate, integrating social media actions into the rewards program expands brands’ exposure resulting in more active users. This can be done by sharing your program all over the channels you have; however, it is important to share on relevant channels and choose actions that make sense to your values.  

2. Make use of social media functions to promote the loyalty program

Once you’ve decided which social channel would fit for your program, you can start sharing content on it to show what’s been designed in mind. Visuals allow brands to not only tell, but also show to the audience. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube offer a wide range of unique functions for your rewards program, including polls, sharing locations or short stories.

An important feature that is rising in popularity on social media today is live video. The best thing about it is that it can be saved and watched later, but when it’s happening, social media will send a notification to everyone within your network. It is extremely powerful to grab attention compared to usual videos. Inviting special guests to join in live or sharing video about your program is a cool option to promote the activity.

No matter what functions you use, remember to tailor content to the platform you share on. The right content in the wrong place never gets your message delivered to the right people. Cater the post in various channels helps keep track of your and your customers’ activity.

3. Track social media analytics to enhance the rewards program

After setting everything up in social media, how do you know whether your loyalty program is doing its best? One way social media can leverage your program is through analytics. Instagram and Facebook have a business page that enables us to have access to reach, likes and engagement data for a specific time. These numbers and metrics give insight into what content that drives most actions and help you figure out the reason for low engagement content.

Using key metrics from social media is efficient to your loyalty program in terms of A/B tracking. For instance, you are a home furniture distributor who is running a reward program. The prize for it will be a set of towels. Based on the engagement level collected from social media analytics, you can assess how interested your members are in the program. If the engagement is low, it may mean people are not keen on your rewards, the number of participants may lower and you may think of another incentive that is more attractive to the customers. 

Facebook owns another great tool called Facebook Lookalike Audiences which allows Facebook advertisers to build new customers that match the profile of the top existing ones. Based on the members’ details got from signing up for the loyalty program, you can import them to Facebook target ads to your current members, as well as Facebook Lookalike Audiences to potential ones. This results in more curated customer segments with better-targeted advertisement info.

With social media, your loyalty program can be more efficient than ever. From building research on targets, making content, catering it to different social channels to evaluating the result, social media gets you all. These two cannot be separated, as there’s always room for each to grow. Go get impression on your followers now!