Social media can be an excellent promotional tool for companies, blog owners, and geeks of all descriptions! However, not everyone gets behind using social media to build trust, as it may seem like a waste of time to them, but that’s completely untrue. Used effectively, it can ultimately drive in more business.
To convince you, here are 4 benefits of building trust through social media.
1. People Prefer to Do Business with People (or Companies) They Trust
Getting people or another business to purchase something the first time is exceedingly difficult. One of the reasons that Amazon.com is so successful now is because there’s a self-enforcing repeating cycle where consumers are going to the brand they’ve heard of instead of a newer one offering cheaper prices.
People like to deal with and buy from people and companies that they like or trust. Any way that companies can accelerate the process of building that initial trust, they should grab it with both hands.
Social media presents unusual methods of communication with likely buyers that didn’t exist before. When managed well, trust can develop from such communications.
2. Puts a Human Face on Brand Communications
The larger a business becomes, the more difficult it is to seem human. They become huge corporations that people feel that they cannot readily identify with. Huge advertising budgets are deployed to try to put a face to a brand.
When building trust on social media, it provides a brand voice and personality to the communications. This is sorely lacking in many traditional advertising platforms today. When seeming more human, people are quicker to trust the brand.
3. Brings Potential Customers Closer to Joining the Troop
People who read messages from a company on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere are engaging with the brand. While they may not yet have chosen to visit their website or purchase something from the business, they’ve already begun a relationship with the brand and company.
As such, it could be argued that they’re near the ‘top of the (sales) funnel’ because they’re using some of their scant time available to read tweets, retweets, or helpful articles posted to a company’s Facebook account. Brand reputation builds from this early introduction too.
4. The Brand is Given the Benefit of the Doubt
Making a purchase online from a company that’s fairly new or not well known creates doubts like:
- What if they run off with my credit card information?
- Will the package be dispatched on time and arrive undamaged?
- Is their customer service helpful to customers?
It is difficult for a business to assuage these concerns just by saying: “Trust us. We’re good people.”
However, by building trust through social media engagement, people build up a feeling about the brand that can put them over the top with making a first purchase. Also, it can give them the internal fortitude to hold steady by giving the company the benefit of the doubt should there be any temporary setbacks or unexpected delays.
Trust is hard to earn and easily lost. Companies should use every tool at their disposal to build trust early and often with both potential customers and current customers. This includes the use of social media despite the sometimes-volatile nature of these platforms.
