You have built a brand with slick marketing, designed a killer website, and created pages on numerous social media channels. Now, it’s time to make your brand personal. In order to truly engage your community, they need to see the human side of your brand.
Humanizing a brand goes beyond the basics of a business’ product or service and instead allows audiences to understand more about you and the underlying messages you want to convey. This simply means you have to interact with your audience on a personal level. You have to learn to make friends with your customers on social media and be able to invite them to participate in a community behind the brand. But how?
Cultivate and nurture your online community with these 8 effective tips.
1. Use a Little Humor into Your Posts
It never hurts to throw a couple of funny posts here and there. It can actually be a power tactic, especially if humor fits the online identity of your brand. Take this Bunsen Burger’s Facebook update for instance. Not only were they able to inject some fun into it, they were also able to give information about their special offer through the post.
Source: Bunsen Burger’s FB Page
Humor is a no-brainer tactic to connect with your social community. Just make sure your humor won’t hurt other people or come across as rude. Keep your posts light, fun, and informative and you’re on your way to building better social media connections.
2. Surprise and Delight Your Audience
Who doesn\’t love surprises? Customer or not, we all want to be delighted. As a business owner, doing little things that show your appreciation to your customers who regularly engage with your brand goes a long way. Apart from showing them that you care and you value their opinion, going out of your way to surprise them will build long-lasting loyalty and keep them coming back.
Contests, promos, and giveaways are a good way to develop your brand advocacy. Sanuk frequently gives away new pairs of shoes to their avid Instagram followers, making it a delight for people to be part of their growing client base.
Source: @SanukFootwear
3. Engage in Conversation
When your audience approach you with a concern or question, it is wise to respond to make them feel they are heard. But you don’t necessarily have to wait for someone to tweet you directly or post on your page to interact with your followers.
Customers appreciate it when brands engage in conversation simply for the sake of interacting because it builds good rapport and it makes them feel valued as a customer. HubSpot connects with its audience this way, as seen in a twitter convo below.
Source: @HubSpot
4. Own Up to Your Mistakes
Companies make mistakes, too. And owning up to this disruptive quality shows that your brand isn’t a robot and has, in fact, a human side. Remember: to err is human. If your brand makes an error, acknowledge the mistake and let your customers know what you intend to do to repair it, as what the Photojojo team did when a customer complained about one of their products.
Source: @Photojojo
Beyond calming them down, this demonstrates that you are listening to and that you truly value your customers.
5. Offer Solutions and Helpful Information
One of the best ways to humanize a brand is by creating content that caters to the needs of the customers. If you know and understand the pain points of your audience and provide content that addresses these concerns, your brand can connect more effectively with those individuals.
Offer assistance and solutions to some of your audience’s problems and they may just be grateful to you forever.
6. Interact as If You’re Conversing with a Friend
You do not need to impress anyone on social media with your corporate speak or wide vocabulary. Sure, you have to establish yourself as an authoritative and credible figure. But when it comes to conversing on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, you want to come across as someone who’s friendly and approachable.
By speaking in layman’s terms, your audience is able to relate to your brand better. Forget corporate speak and interact with your community by using everyday language, as what Groupon did in an example below.
Source: Groupon’s FB Page
7. Create Your Own Personality
Just as each person is one-of-a-kind, brands need to develop a unique personality on social media. They have to have their own voice in order to attract more people and build more meaningful relationships.
Many brands have done a good job developing a unique persona and voice. But one brand that stands out is Coca-Cola. The brand has been producing countless content that have gone viral not just on social media but across the web. Their posts carry out powerful, inspiring messages and a personal, motivational tone which resonates to their audience.
Being creative, informative and entertaining can certainly go a long way towards building a huge client base on social media. But showing your brand’s quirky personality may be the simplest way to score points over Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and other leading social media channels.
8. Put a Collective Face on Your Brand
Do not post in anonymity. Make it abundantly clear to your audience that real people exist behind the corporate logo. As ClickZ.com has put it, “Don’t be a stranger.” Show your customers that your brand has personality and pulse that go well beyond just facts and information.
Humanizing your brand on social media is all about making connections with your audience in a meaningful and personal way. While many businesses succeed in this pursuit, there are some companies that do not. The reason being that they fail to communicate on a human level and come across as robotic more than authentic. In order to effectively humanize your brand, you need to build personal connections.
Have you tried any of the above-mentioned strategies? What other tactics have you done to connect with your audience?