Three Ways to Build Transparency with Social Media

Are you maintaining a transparency in your business?

What ways are you adopting for it?

Transparency is more than a buzzword and holds a great value for any business who wants to build strong brand and stable customer base. Be it internally (employees) or externally (customers), transparency everyone wants to have transparency. Transparency does not only decide how open is your brand, rather how close you are to your customers. It's not just about openness but about how you interact and get along with your customers.

With social media, marketers have found an additional platform to portray their brand transparency. Transparency helps brand build trust and encourage customers to become loyal. As a marketer when you get customers' brand loyalty, you cannot ask anything more than that. According to Forbes, 62% of millennials say that if a brand engages with them on social networks, they are more likely to become a loyal customer. What it proves that customers want to attach to a brand which has regular interactions with them. This consistency of interaction helps build brand trust and loyalty.

Now, let's talk about the ways how social media can be used for maintaining transparency. 

1) Community Building: Social media is a great way to build communities. Especially with the user-generated content (UGC), social media holds the great potential to drive gated business community. Social media platforms, forums are great ways to generated "Earned Media" and gives brands a unique look in the crowded market place. When a brand promotes community building on social platforms, it encourages users to get associated with it. For them, the brand becomes the advocate of transparency and they become eager to know more about the brand and its customer-base. Communities also help brands understand customers' expectations, concerns and issues and solve them in an open environment. This openness of understanding customers and helping them solve with the gated community paves the way for transparency.

2) Real-time Conversations: Social media is all about real-time conversations. When a brand encourages real-time conversations with the users, the latter find it trustworthy and reliable. Remember, social media is all about being authentic and real to your users. And when it comes to transparency, nothing can beat authenticity. Hence, real-time conversations are very important to implement and promote transparency.

3) Human Touch: Social media is all about human. When a brand has human touch to its social media presence and portrays it with authenticity, the chances of getting associated with the brand tremendously increases. A human face always symbolizes trust and authenticity. When you find a brand interacting with its users with focus on human values and stresses on simplicity and convenience, then users are more likely to increase the interaction frequency. This encourages the brand to be more real and transparent with their users.