Building relationships should be your branding focus; however, if you are one of many companies struggling to figure out how to humanize your brand on social media, rest assured you’re not alone. Many have tried and failed to make social media connections that simply feel artificial.
Engaging with your social audience on a meaningful level, helps humanize your brand. Here are a few tips on how you can sound like a human on social media without losing sight of your branding.
Humanize Your Brand on Social Media
1. Use Everyday Language
Many people join social channels because they want to be entertained. They don’t want to listen to business-speak and industry jargon while browsing their news feeds.
Check out how Levi’s responded to a happy customer’s shout-out in the post below. They could have replied with something like “Thank you” or “Keep motivating us.” Instead, they simply said “Noted!” which gave the response a witty tone and feel.
2. Connect the Online and In Store Experience
Businesses often struggle with how best to merge their online and offline activities. One approach is to create an offline experience that’s as close as possible to the online experience.
Nordstrom has a strong Pinterest community of 4.5 million users. To bridge the gap between their physical store and website, Nordstrom uses Pinterest to identify items popular with social followers, and then they highlight those products in the physical store. This way, customers in their physical store know about the most pinned products.
3. Engage in Conversation
Your our audience wants to be heard when they approach you with a question or concern. But you can also talk to people just for the sake of interacting with them. Small gestures can go a long way toward building rapport on social channels.
A satisfied customer posted the tweet below, recommending HubSpot to her Twitter followers. HubSpot thanked her for the endorsement, making her feel valued as a customer.
Social media marketing is all about connecting with your target audience. Some businesses do this effectively, and some do not. The reason that some fail is that they talk to their audience in a businesslike way, rather than connecting on a human level.
To build more meaningful relationships on social media, you need to humanize your brand.
What do you think? Have you tried any of these tactics to connect with your target audience? How do you humanize your brand on social media?