10 Ways to Humanize Your Brand With Social Media

Humanizing a brand simply means trying to interact with each customer on a personal level. But for a company to implement that style, there needs to be a shift in how it responds to customers, particularly via social media.

Do you want to build stronger relationships on social media?

Do you know where to start?

Engaging with your social audience on a meaningful level, helps humanize your brand.

In this article you’ll find ten ways to make your brand more human on social media.

#1: Show a Sense of Humor

Humor is an easy and effective way to connect with your audience on social media. The three factors to keep in mind when using humor are fun, information and control. You also want to make sure that your humor doesn’t hurt other people.

#2: 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 Facebook news feed.

For example, look 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.

Speak to your customers in the same way you’d speak to friends.

#3: Blend Online and In-Store Experiences

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.

For example, 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.

#4: Create Access

Maybe you can’t invite everyone into the boardroom, but you can give them access to other parts of your business. Few social strategists understand their audience better than Liz Philips of golf giant TaylorMade. “We are, first and foremost, golfers,” Philips says. The company expresses this identity by sponsoring a TaylorMade PGA tour van that travels to weekly PGA events with a correspondent who live tweets to followers.

#5: Engage in Conversation

Your 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.

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#6: Acknowledge Mistakes

It’s okay to demonstrate human qualities when managing your social channels. If your company makes a mistake, acknowledge it and be transparent to your customers about what you’re doing to fix it. Owning up to mistakes shows we’re human.

This type of gesture calms down angry customers and builds trust between them and your brand. It helps to demonstrate to customers that you value them and you’re listening to what they have to say.

#7: Sign Your Posts

Adding a poster’s name to your social updates is an easy way to put a human face to your brand. The idea is to give your audience a clear picture of the person they’re talking to, making the interaction more personal.

#8: Provide Solutions

If you understand your audience’s pain points, you can more effectively connect with those people on social channels. Provide solutions to some of those pain points and your audience will start looking at your brand in a more friendly way.

#9: Surprise Customers on social media

We all love surprises, especially when they come from people we like. Just as in real life, you can make your audience happy on social channels by treating them to something special.

#10: Develop a Unique Voice

Each person has a way of talking that makes him or her unique. In the same way, brands need to create their own personality on social media.

Adidas has done a great job developing a unique voice, and if you follow them closely on social channels, you can see that their tone is both authoritative and motivating. These attributes have helped build Adidas’s social media persona into something their audience recognizes and appreciates.

Conclusion

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? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

 

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