Hubspot shared with me several statistics about social media. The statistics that caught my attention were the ones on how business are using social media and the results they have seen. This particular slide (Shown above) caught my attention and I keep coming back to it!
Why? Why is it that 53% of shoppers who clicked through from a friends Facebook page have made a purchase(averaging just a little over 100 dollars per purchase). We receive links in emails and we don’t touch them, no way “I don’t want a virus!”, but 53% percent of shoppers will click on that link from their friend on Facebook and purchase.
Here is my guess, it is Trust. We trust our friends, and we trust Facebook(or hopefully we do)! Trust is what we all strive to build, not only from a personal level, but also from a business level. Once we get that trust, we need to keep it, maintain it, and care for it! So how do we build trust? There are several blog posts out there telling us how to build trust, but most of the blogs I think over do it. I think it is a very simple formula. The formula is communicate with your audience, respond quickly, often and accurately.
Communicating with your audience, not only means having a business conversation but also means letting them learn a little something about you. Tell them things that are going on with you personally. They will feel that you are inviting them to your home (and in a way it is, for you and them). These conversations should be consistent and often. Let them feel as if their Thursday afternoon coffee clutch is with you! Once they are comfortable, they will look for more. once you start attracting followers, you will notice that they will respond to your posts. These replies can be positive or negative. This can be scary, intimidating and the actions we want to take is to negate or ignore negative comments. Best strategy is to handle it right up front, respond whether its negative or positive and respond quickly. A couple examples of what not to do then what to follows below. United Airlines chose not respond to the criticism of the breaking a customers guitar, he took it the the internet and wrote a song about breaking a guitar. An example of using social media to build trust is with the arlington police in texas, they have a belief that social media (twitter ) can help them, so they took the initiative to start tweeting to their community. I believe they started early this summer. since then they have over 4000 followers and have tweeted over 3000 times.
So in my opinion the simple formula for building online trust is to communicate and respond quickly, often and accurately! I believe this will get you part of that 53%