Investing in the human element in business can make your brand more relatable and attractive.
It doesn’t matter if your business sells fun and quirky products to consumers or if you’re a B2B enterprise in a complicated niche vertical, adding a human element to your branding makes your business more relatable and attractive. This in turn which increases sales in an age where emotional branding is more important than ever, especially for millennial consumers. Consider these stats:
- For every $1 a brand spends on improving customer experience, it reaps $3 in benefits
- Brands that offer transparency increase loyalty — 94 percent of consumers are likely to offer loyalty to transparent brands
- Consumers spend more on brands they view as “meaningful” — meaningful brands have a 46 percent higher share of wallet for consumers compared to low-scoring brands
On social media, you have the ability to create microsites for your business that reflect its personality and enable you to directly connect with customers. Here’s how to make your company brand more personal and approachable using social media.
Add Personality Into Creative Elements of Your Pages
Show off the human side of your business by putting your people on full display. Profile pictures, banner images, and descriptions should all highlight your workplace culture. If you feature photos of products, pair them with photos of smiling staff members or customers.
Use each social media channel’s guidelines for optimal photos, and have your design team create images that strategically show off your business personality. On video sharing sites like YouTube, create a welcome video that includes various members of your team who invite viewers to connect with the page.
Change up the creative based on holidays or relevant events to your customers. If your business just celebrated a milestone for how long you’ve been open, you could take a company photo and upload it to your profile banner. Use an upcoming holiday as an excuse to show off the fun photos you took from last year’s office party.
Engage Customers with Compelling Content
Every piece of content you post on social media is a reflection of your brand’s point of view. There’s an opportunity to make content more personal, even if it’s sourced from outside your business, by inviting followers to discuss it with your business. Using content that is inspired by real-time events or topics that are trending allows your brand to show that you care about what affects your followers.
In addition to sharing external content related to your industry or your followers’ interests, aim to regularly share content that provides insight into your company and its inner workings. Ways you can create content that humanizes your business include:
- Create blog posts that include employee interviews or that are employee features
- Write first-person opinion pieces on industry developments from a wide variety of employees
- Share company news and press releases
- Create event listings that invite followers to attend so that they can get to know your brand on a deeper level
The optimal ratio of branded versus external content you share will depend on how engaged your followers are. With whatever you’re sharing on social media, have measurement tools in place that allow you to track your efforts. You might find followers want more branded content, which gives you more opportunities to share business insights.
Spotlight Employees on Social
Instead of outsourcing social media creative and content to an agency, ask your team for ideas and how they’d like to get involved. You’ll create more relevant content while making employees feel special, which could spur more Employee Advocacy. Use photo and video sections to help your followers get to know your team members better. You could share weekly “get-to-know-you” segments of employees from various departments, or feature your staff in product tutorial videos.
Allow followers to get to know employees on an even deeper level by hosting employee takeovers of various social media accounts. For example, a science researcher at your business could host a Q-and-A chat on Twitter, answering questions about product development. Your CEO could take over the Instagram account for a day to share photos from an exciting conference. Your customer service team could host a Facebook Live video, where they give Facebook followers a behind-the-scenes look into the inner workings of the department.
Your business can also consider sharing updates directly from the personal accounts of employees when they are relevant to your brand. This supports your employees’ personal branding efforts while making your content diverse and engaging.
Make Every Feature Personal
With every new social page you create, and with every new addition you make, empower your team to contribute ideas for how to make your social profiles more personality-infused. Think about emotional differentiators like humor, warmth, caring and empathy when crafting copy and developing images. Since social media gives you the ability to measure every effort, you can see what personality traits you’re exhibiting on social that most resonate with your followers.
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