New Social Media Study Reveals Shocking Statistics on Brand Success

In the age of customer retention, social media might just be the key to success. In fact, a new social media study showed that social media engagement by your existing customers will improve brand perception, loyalty, and word of mouth recommendations.

Recently, a group of U.S. researchers dug into the potential impact of social media interactions with brand content. What they found was striking. As it turns out, getting your existing customers to interact with your content can be a crucial driver to improve their value to your business.

What the Study Found

In many ways, your success as a brand depends on your audience’s ability and willingness to associate human characteristics with your brand. This type of anthropomorphism, as the new social media study found, is the core driver behind engagement with your social media content.

If you’re seen as a business, you won’t get comments or shares. But if your audience sees your brand as a living entity, that potential increases drastically. And when those interactions happen, your brand can begin to reap the rewards.

In fact, the social media study found that consumers who engage with their favorite brands on a regular basis are more likely to have a positive view of the brand. As a result, they remain loyal to that business even over long periods of time, and even become more likely to recommend it to their peers.

The Importance of Customer Retention

Begin digging into the importance of both customer retention and audience recommendations, and you begin to understand why this study is so pivotal. For instance, 88% of internet users trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from a friend, and that number rises every year. Each online review and recommendation, in other words, is another piece of evidence your audience will use to decide whether to become a customer.

In addition, businesses of all sizes are beginning to understand the true impact of customer loyalty. Retaining your existing customers, in fact, is both less expensive and comes with a higher chance of success than attracting new customers. Both matter; but for consistent business growth, retention should play a key role in creating your marketing strategy.

As a result, even small businesses are beginning to increase their customer retention spending. But in reality, simply optimizing your social media content for interactions can help you improve your efforts in this area.

How to Get Your Customers to Interact With Your Content

As the new social media study shows, one of the keys to success in retention is social media interaction. But how do you accomplish that feat? How can you make sure that your content actually prompts your audience to like, share, and comment on your individual posts?

The answer is complex, but far from impossible. Social media has received its name for a reason. Experts have long suggested that to be successful on Facebook, Twitter, or any other network, you need to create content specifically designed to prompt interactions. The more connected you can make your followers feel, the more likely they’ll be to recommend your business and remain your customer for a long time to come.

In short, this study may just be the last nail in the coffin for social media as a purely promotional outlet. Sure, you can use your content to directly promote your products or services. But if that content fails to garner interactions from your followers, you are missing out on a crucial opportunity.

Ask questions. Answer both concerns and negative comments. In other words, make your customers feel involved, in order to maximize the positive impact of your efforts on your business growth. To learn more about using social media as a retention and recommendation driver, contact us.