How Are You Saying ‘Thank You’ to Social Media Community?

One step that gets overlooked in most Nightlife social media strategies is how companies go about thanking their audience and customers. Your customers and audiences play a significant role in whether your online marketing strategy will succeed, especially if it focuses around social media. Saying “thank you” is now just as important as understanding where and how to communicate with them.

Don’t Say Thank You With Your Own Products or Services

Unless you give your customers a key to your venue, saying “thank you” with your own “stuff” comes off as self serving and a bit tacky. This amounts to silently saying, “I’m too lazy to get you a gift that you’d appreciate.”

A mass marketed coupon for “20% off your next bar tab” isn’t a great way to say thank you either. If it’s a coupon that anyone else can get but is only distinguished by a different tracking code, there’s nothing really special about it. It could even be seen as a covert attempt to get the community to buy more of your stuff. The last thing you want is your efforts at building solid relationships sabotaged by a misstep in how you say thank you.

Take the time to understand what the social community values, especially if you want to thank a community as a group.

Maybe you’re working on establishing relationships with a group in Flickr in which group members add photos of the different pictures they took at your venue and they share and discuss what they did. How could you thank them as a group? Perhaps you could offer each of them a year’s Pro Membership to Flickr, or a photo package with Snapfish so they can print out and frame their favorite photos? This would be relevant and a different way to say thank you to an entire group.

Do the Unexpected

The unexpected thank you is likely going to be the most remembered and most talked about one.  In addition to being touching to the person who receives these thank you notes or unexpected gifts, it also makes these people realize your venue isn’t just another company out for their money. It shows that real people who care are behind the operations at your venue. From sending flowers to a customer who lost their purse at the club, to researching that a client really liked “Pepsi” and sending that to the VIP table on their next visit, you take the time to show customers that your venue values those personal relationships established.

Hand Written Notes Go a Long Way

I used to promote at a club called Spirits at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida.  The VIP waitresses would write hand-written thank you notes.  I found this unusually nice, and I still remember it.

The art of writing thank you notes in today’s electronic age seems to be something of the past. Sending a handwritten thank you note nowadays gets talked about because it’s so rare. Even your social media marketer can send a handwritten thank you to people in social media communities who help you out.  What about that girl Jennifer who kept posting your event on her page?  Saying Thank You to her will go a long way.

Whenever I get a written or personalized thank you note from a company (not one that is obviously computer generated), I take notice. I remember it. A lot of times I keep them and tell people about them.

A company can say thank you many ways, or tell its audience and customers that you appreciate them. With social media, venues need to be even more cognizant of how exactly they’re doing that. Saying thank you to your customers or the people you’re engaging with can become a conversation all on its own and affect how you are perceived in the community’s eyes.