I was cleaning up my home studio and came across a sticker that came with some parts I ordered to mount my microphone from the ceiling in my recording booth. I decided to put it on my newly-relocated computer tower that now sits on top of my desk. I took a picture, and posted it on social.

I tagged Heil Sound, and also tagged the other companies that made the things that generally live on my desk and get used on a regular basis, saying that if they sent me stickers I would gladly add them and share them.

Now, I honestly wasn’t expecting a response, and I certainly wasn’t going to get mad if no one responded. Best case, I get some stickers, worst case, nothing happens.

Within minutes, Norse Foundry replied to the tweet asking for my address.

I forgot about the interaction until yesterday when I checked the mail, and low and behold, there was an envelope with a return address from Norse Foundry, and not one, not two, but THREE stickers inside. I was disproportionately over the moon for such a small thing.

I immediately added one of the stickers to my tower, and I have some ideas for what I want to do with the others. And they are very nice, high-quality stickers, I have to say.

With this simple act of responding to a tweet, this company was able to ensure some customer loyalty. You better believe that the next time I want to buy dice or some tabletop gaming accessories, Norse Foundry will be the first site I check out.

So here are some very simple things that every brand* should be doing on social media in 2020.

* By “brand”, I’m not limiting this to products or corporations. This includes “personal brands” as well. If you are a blogger or an influencer or creator who is attempting to grow a loyal following, these things will apply as well.

Be Grateful

If you have customers that are taking the time to post nice things about you on their social channels, you should absolutely take the time to respond to every one of them. Say, “Thank you,” at the very least; maybe write something a little more involved or poignant if the mood takes you. But above all else, be genuine.

And by all of them, I mean all of them. Not just some. All. The time you spend on this now will pay off dividends later. And it doesn’t matter how big you get, how many followers you have, you should always do this. When you stop connecting with your fans, someone else will.

Please avoid the trap of clicking the “like” button and leaving it at that when someone says something nice about you.

As I type this, I am reminded of this particular interaction; I want to make sure I’m being clear.

Surprise & Delight

As someone who has been in charge of marketing, and someone who has owned their own consumer products business, I know that every dollar counts. I know that swag ain’t free, and that margins matter, especially in the early stages of starting a business. But I also know how excited people got when I randomly gave them a free bottle of barbecue sauce.

Using my original example, Norse Foundry sent me stickers. They could have sent none and just responded, and that would have been great. They could have just sent one sticker, and that would have been great. They sent three. That’s awesome.

Why? Because it wasn’t expected. My expectation was initially nothing, then after the interaction it was that I would be receiving one sticker. They exceeded that.

Do this. Find some way to every now and then surprise and delight your fans, be it through randomly sending them stickers, or some free product, or helping them get more followers, or…well, the ways you can do this are as varied as are the people who like your stuff, so you’ll need to figure this out for yourself.

It doesn’t need to be an every interaction thing, and it also doesn’t have to be a public thing. Norse Foundry could have DM’d me with the same interaction, and I would have still posted the photos of the stickers.

Make It About Them

This is about celebrating your fans, not about showing how awesome you are.

You ever know someone that, no matter what the conversation, within three sentences were able to always make the conversation about them? Annoying, right?

That’s almost every brand out there. They use social to make the conversation about them, even when ostensibly talking about someone or something else. They see social as an advertising platform as opposed to a communication platform.

So when you interact with your fans, and when you surprise and delight them, don’t try to point them to a sale or a promotion or an upcoming event. Just say thank you, give them a little treat, and move on. Resist the urge to promote something. Have someone you trust who will wait behind you with a frying pan, poised to hit you upside the head with it should you start to succumb to that temptation if need be.

Be Genuine.

The promotions of “show your [INSERT BRAND HERE] and use #Whatever and be entered to win” are tired, and they attract people who are not “fans”. You may get a ton of interaction, you make get a ton of new followers…but how many of them are engaged? How many of them are only “entering” so they can get free stuff? How many of them will go back to ignoring you once the promotion is over? These are vanity metrics and don’t matter in the slightest.

Now, you may say, “But Brian, all of that may happen, but we also may keep x% of them as true fans!” True, that may happen, but you’ll need to sift through the detritus to find them. You may also alienate people who have been loyal fans and customers when they see their loyalty being ignored.

The better way here is to genuinely appreciate the fans you have. They will talk about the ways you engage and interact, the way that you surprise and delight them, and you will get new fans through them. Growth is slower this way, sure, but it’s also sustainable, and it a better long-term strategy.

This is the biggest mistake people make on social: they want followers now. They want success now. They want sales/sponsors/love now.

And there are ways of doing that, ways to game the system, to hack the algorithm. But success like this is short-lived, and you’ll need to start from scratch over and over again as that success fades and as attention shifts to other platforms.

Get On TikTok

This is the most specific piece of advice here. It’s a rapidly-growing, rapidly-aging platform that has huge organic reach right now. I myself was able to get to over 30k followers within a month or so by posting consistently.

It’s a platform for entertainment, so leave all of the promotional tactics at the door. Take the time to see what your audience is posting, and see how you can play in that arena.

Best case scenario: you get a ton of followers, and eventually start generating new sales or leads off of your content. By the time your competitors glom onto the platform (like so many that were late to the game on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc) you will already have cemented a firm fan base and taken advantage of the organic reach now before the algorithms kick in and start limiting exposure in favor of paid boosted content.

Worst case scenario: you learn some new content creation tactics. You’ll still have a large fan base on there, and when you shift to the new platform in 6, 12, 24, 36 months from now, it will be easier to bring them with you. This is what has happened to a lot of the popular content creators on TikTok when they moved off of Vine to Instagram and SnapChat, and when they moved off of those platforms onto TikTok.

Bonus: by doing these things, you never know when the right blogger/influencer will write or post about it and cause things to blow up for you. How many times have I mentioned Norse Foundry in this post? By doing a nice thing, they were able to create some unintentional marketing for themselves. (I’m not that guy, by the way. Sending me stuff will not make your brand pop.)