8 Strategies to Build Brand Trust Through Social Media
Trying to build a secure marketplace for your brand? Brands invest a lot of time developing new products and the perfect marketing strategy to promote them among potential customers. Technological advancement and the emergence of social media have made it easier for brands to engage with their audience.
But with so many brands emerging in the landscape, you need to have something that attracts your target audience. Not to mention how social media has become a predominant factor in influencing customers’ purchasing decisions and building an authentic brand image.
Here are eight effective strategies that your brand can use to build trust and attract customers through social media.
1. Maintain consistency with your brand’s voice
If you want to build a community across various social media networks, then make sure whatever you share on social media represents your brand and its ideology. Customers have swayed away about how you describe your product or services and what kind of images you share online.
You need to come up with unique and creative ideas about your brand to hold customers’ attention. However, if you are an established brand with a decent number of followers on social media, then the consistency will keep your product reputed.
2. Share unique and engaging content
If you want to show your audience that you are the initiator, post unique content on social media platforms. Not only does it drive traffic to your website, but it also reflects that you use your brand to share original ideas. Maintain a consistent pattern by keeping your content informative as well as non-promotional.
If you have a powerful presence on social media networks and post the content daily to build customers, then keep track of their needs too.
Don’t post similar and severe content every time because audiences’ viewpoints change daily.
Include some variations and fun elements in your content strategy to entertain and keep your audience engaged with your brand. This way, any brand or business can increase their followers and build trust among their followers. Moreover, it gives the customers an impression that you are your products’ content creator.
For instance, Wayfair,
Wayfair is an American e-commerce company that sells home goods. They post engaging content in a saturated space by sharing interesting photo captions and short videos, which helps promote user engagement. Moreover, they don’t stick to a particular pattern but instead, focus on trends and popular topics.
3. Utilize user-generated content
Over the past decade, customers and visitors have stopped appreciating promotional images or content created by professionals. Instead, they want to see authentic content and genuine people using a particular product as it assures the brand. So brands must encourage users to share their experiences on social media platforms.
Sometimes, when you’re half-way across the country, you can still #ShareACoke with your dad for the Holidays ?@CocaCola pic.twitter.com/Eyf8XV8R51
— Ryan Trabuco (@RyanTrabuco) December 3, 2018
Create a brand hashtag or a marketing hashtag campaign and give people a way to communicate with your business or brand. You can also leverage this hashtag to create a live hashtag feed that can be displayed across every marketing touchpoint using a social network aggregator tool like Taggbox. For example, Coca-Cola did it with its #ShareACoke campaign and generated huge user-generated content on social media.
Get more benefits from earned user-generated content by embedding social media streams on your business website or displaying them on a digital screen during events like product launches, concerts, conferences, in-store marketing campaigns and more. Use the best social aggregator tool to pull all social media user-generated content and create a social hub on your business website.
A social hub keeps your website up-to-date and gives an attractive look so visitors can spend more time on your website. By embedding it on your website, you can encourage the customers to buy your product or services. Moreover, it reflects your brand’s success story. You can try Taggbox to create a social wall and collect all live social media feeds from social media platforms.
Let’s Engage Your Website Visitors
4. Live-stream your content
To create urgency about the product or services, live-stream your content on social media to attract customers. The live-stream content is only for a limited duration, which creates buzz about a product’s recent launch.
Live streaming increases audience participation as you can take time to connect with individuals one-to-one, and it helps you in building trust.
Followers on social media platforms want to join the live stream so they don’t miss out on something important. Although live streaming requires much effort and time, the outcome is huge, too. When live streaming, especially when prioritizing real-time interaction, make sure to test the HLS URL to avoid buffering, dropped frames, and a frustrating experience for viewers.
5. Avoid overdoing, be transparent
Transparency is essential to gaining the audience’s trust as it reflects your brand’s ideology. If you are transparent with the content you post, it reflects that you consider your brand as an authority and not using it for money-making only.
For instance, if a follower posts a complaint about a product on your social media page, it may feel right to delete that post. However, if you keep that post on your page, it shows that you are open to criticism and honest with your audience.
6. Stay online and give responses to reviews
For brands, it is very tough to maintain their online reputation on social media. Because social media is a platform where customers can directly connect with the brands and share their complaints, you should prepare for negative feedback because complaints on social media quickly gain momentum, and all the audience can see them. Therefore, create a strategy to deal with them – be honest, transparent, and never negatively treat any feedback. If you give proper and satisfactory responses to negative feedback quickly and positively, you can build more trust among customers for your brand.
Handle negative feedback:
- Don’t argue with your customers on feedback
- Be human with customers
- Provide a helpful and satisfactory solution
- Stay online and respond to them quickly
If your brand is easily accessible to your customers, it makes their tasks simple. Moreover, it motivates them to share their queries or complaints if they have any. Finally, it encourages the audience to engage in a conversation with your brand and assures them that you are accountable for your products, services, and customer service.
While responding to the customers’ posts, ensure you address them by their names. It shows them that you care about their reviews, and it will be a reward for them.
7. Organize contest alerts and giveaways
Who doesn’t like being rewarded? Most of us get excited about contesting alerts, especially when it’s one of the most preferred brands. Instagram has become a popular platform for contest alerts as it creates massive engagement among its followers.
Organizing giveaways are the best way to build trust among your followers, and the best part is that you don’t need to invest much in your product promotion.
You can know your product reviews by giveaway contest, and it transforms the followers into customers. However, remember the giveaways should be genuine as it increases customer trustworthiness.
8. Collaborate with influencers
Customers no longer trust the traditional marketing pattern. That’s why a customer takes a purchasing decision based on the influencers’ feedback.
If you are a brand, start building a relationship with influencers who can promote your product and generate authentic engagement with the customers on social media.
Because customer purchasing decision relies on expert opinions, many brands have started implementing influence marketing in their strategy.
The influencers have already established themselves, so it becomes easy for them to influence the customers and turn them into potential customers.
Collaborating with the influencers is cost-effective, too, as you don’t need to spend much money promoting your product. In addition, influencers can quickly increase your brand’s sales and build customer trust.
Conclusion
According to PwC’s Global Consumer Insights Survey, there has been a change in the way brands deal with customers and respond to their queries. They reached out to 22,000 consumers in 27 territories across the globe and asked the customer what factors other than price were important to them. Almost one in three answered ‘trust’ as an essential element in choosing a brand.
Gaining your audience’s trust can be quite tricky. Especially when we see so many brands emerging in the digital space. Here we have shared eight sure-fire ways to boost your brand authenticity with social media.
So, what are you waiting for? Get started already!
