Social networking sites offer vast potential for business. The enormous number of followers and their propensity for sharing content provide a wealth of lucrative opportunities for businesses to develop client relationships and promote their business services. As such, listed below are three of the most effective ways in which you can integrate social media with your brand, in order to develop and sustain online credibility and trust with your clients.

online credibility

#1- Post content regularly

Regular, consistent posting enables you to establish and sustain trust between you and your followers, enabling them to get to know you better and develop confidence in your online credibility. If you post relevant content on a regular basis, your current clients will feel motivated to recommend your brand to others as well as seeking your services in the future. Social media engagement is an ideal way of interacting with your followers and piquing their interest in your brand’s message and services.

Regular content enables you to create a channel of conversation with your target audience. In so doing, your clients will be engaged with your brand and therefore will be motivated to share your brand with their own social networking communities. The success of this trend is evident on social media sites such as Pinterest. Currently Pinterest has over 70 million users and research has revealed that users who were notified of products on Pinterest spent 70% more money on those products than users who were referred from other online networks. Post regularly on these sites and your brand can achieve similar marketing success.

#2- Establish and sustain social media discussions

Once you have started sharing content, you will inevitably receive responses from clients. This creates a lucrative opportunity to consolidate your brand and establish viable client-business relationships. When clients comment on your posts or share them on their social media sites, comment back and initiate a dialogue. This enables you to establish further trust with your clients by demonstrating that you value their opinions and contributions. Moreover, by interacting with your clients, you can develop social media discussions which other users will be intrigued to follow, share and comment upon. In this way, social media enables you to discover your client’s opinions and preferences with regards to your brand. Subsequently, you can tailor your business model to appeal to the needs of your clients.

Paul Williamson, head of Realia Marketing states that the success of a brand lies in its ability effectively apply “the art and science of marrying the audiences’ expectations to the aspirations of the business. It’s about establishing values that people relate to and evangelising a brand essence that everyone aspires to. All supported by creative communications that deliver the brand promise“. If clients feel that your brand respects their opinions and reflects their values, they will be motivated to seek your services and recommend them to others.

Social Media Channels

3- Capitalise upon popular social media trends

Social networks facilitate the ability for business and personal users alike to rapidly share informative contentthroughout the Internet. You can capitalise upon this potential to develop client relationships. For example, a new social media trend is emerging; referred to as “trendjacking”. Fundamentally, “trendjacking” is when you create social media content according to, or centred around, a current news topic and immediately release it online. This enables your brand to release short burst of compelling, powerful social media content. Brands such as Oreo have exhibited the power of trendjacking, such as when they created their You Can Still Dunk in the Dark social media campaign during the blackout of the 2013 Super Bowl. Subsequently, you can capitalise upon this increasingly popular trend; generating and sharing articles, images, videos, and a wealth of other multimedia content which is relevant to your brand.

If you can create and share intriguing, informative articles or establish your own trends then users will view your brand as a reliable, innovative resource from which they can glean exclusive insights to share with their own social media communities.