How to Enter the Circle of Trust With Your Audience

Building trust is hard enough to do in the real world (remember trying to convince your girlfriend’s parents you were worthy of their daughter?), but building trust online is even more difficult.

Fortunately, social media affords organizations the opportunity to build trust with consumers online, but only when done correctly. 

But organizations and brand marketers have a long way to go before getting into consumers’ sacred circle: people are more than twice as likely to trust people they know in blogs, on Facebook, and on Twitter than they are to trust brands in the same spaces.

When building trust in social media, people evaluate trustworthiness on the following criteria:

Openness of dialogue

• 64% trust social media more if the dialogue is open to both positive and negative comments

If everyone is in the chorus singing the same tune, and the tune sounds an awful lot like a corporate jingle, it’s going to fall upon deaf ears.

Responsiveness

• 60% trust social media more if the author or sponsor is responsive

Make sure the light is on and someone is home by responding to messages, discussion threads, and reviews in a timely fashion. Things can get out of hand quickly or worse – people could leave.

Size (matters, but not as much as you’d think)

• 38% trust social media more based on the size of the sponsor or authors following

There’s an incredible (and inordinate) focus on building the amount of connections an organization has on any social media platform, but that focus is often misguided.

Sure, size of following factors in (no one wants to be the first to jump in the pool with what might be a shark), but it’s not most important.

People are more comforted by seeing an open dialogue with a transparent social media representative present than they are by seeing droves of other consumers tagging along.

At the end of the day people want to know that they can ask any question they may need to ask, get honest responses quickly from someone who is focusing on serving them.

They won’t trust anything else.

[image: 28misguidedsouls]

Related articles

• A Simple Ninja Tactic To Building Trust Through Sharing (socialmediaexplorer.com)
• Brands Need a More Human Face to Avoid Being “Foreigners” in Social Media, Highlights Research (eon.businesswire.com)