With 2015 quickly approaching and social media spiking the charts daily, sometimes it seems impossible to stay on top of the game. There’s no doubt each day more businesses are shifting toward automated media to help keep up with this fast pace world, but remember consumers can tell the difference between spammy automation and personal engagement. And now Twitter can too with it’s new automation detection tool which denies posts that seem computer generated. Automation serves as an extra “hands”, but it does not replace the human aspect of interacting. Consumers engagement will skyrocket if they can see the “face” behind a brand. Having a brand personality breaks through the social media clutter and keeps viewers interested and yearning for further involvement.
Here are 5 fundamental tips to humanize your brand and ensure consumers develop and continue building a relationship with your brand in 2015.
Probe Don’t Push
Pushing out content through social media is a way of the past. Followers do not want to read irrelevant, text-heavy, or dense articles posted at the same time every day. To humanize your brand, find content that will catch viewers’ attention, make them think and ask intriguing questions for viewers to share their opinions. Mix up the content. Do not just post informative news articles; share daily company triumphs and success stories about guest speaking, blogging opportunities, and customer satisfaction.
Customize
Be an active user and follower. Respond to all posts, comments, +1, likes, tweets, etc. from others mentioning or following your brand. An acknowledgement comment or direct message such as “thanks for following” or “look forward to connecting” has become spammy and goes to the delete pile. Instead reply with an open-ended question generally related to your brand content or respond to something interesting you found on their profile.
Monitor
Ideally every company would have an employee monitoring each social media platform 24 hours a day, but that is not realistic, especially for small businesses and startups. So when humanizing a brand, business do not need to completely eliminate automation; it can be helpful, but the platforms must manually be monitored numerous times a day by a human. Automation can be particularly helpful with continued engagement on the weekend; however, first thing Monday morning all channels should be manually scanned to ensure no comments have been unattended to. With social media, businesses have a small frame of opportunity to respond or they will lose their chance and the consumer’s interest. Once a consumer conversation has finished, make a note to yourself and reach out to the consumer in a few weeks with a new discussion to show your follower they have not been forgotten.
Office Camaraderie
It’s great if your business has mastered interaction and engagement with users but some consumers desire more of a personal connection. Take pictures of company employees out to lunch, during a meeting, or after work playing on an office intramural team and share those with followers. Consumers love visual content. On average, “71% of online adults use Facebook” so take advantage of this free sharing platform and connect through photos and videos of work life.
CEO Voice
The final but very crucial, tip is having the CEO connect with consumers and develop a social media presence. When a CEO is actively posting, liking, retweeting and responding to discussions, it shows dedication and commitment to consumers. Research shows 76% of Twitter users are active and interacting daily. Companies have found that consumer engagement drastically peaks if information is shared through the CEO rather than through a company profile.
An important thing to remember when humanizing your brand through social media is differentiating your content according to each individual social media platform. Do not post the same content across Twitter, Facebook, Google +, LinkedIn, etc. Consumers will lose interest and become unengaged. Utilize the plethora of individualized social sharing mediums available and customize your content according to each platforms’ demographics. Follow these 5 tips and your brand will soar to new limits in 2015.