There’s rarely a meeting in which a company or brand’s social media activity isn’t brought up. Among the things discussed is the success of social media measured by the number of followers and friends. However, having a high number of Likes” on your Facebook page doesn’t mean as much as you may think.
A survey by The About Group has shown that Like” doesn’t equal trust in a consumers mind. What they will consider more closely are the comments on the page and recommendations from friends.
The study showed that with all the information available online, consumers identify trust as a valuable filter for identifying valuable solutions.” Without this trust being triggered (which become even more important when the consumer is on a mobile device), consumers won’t be inclined to engage with a brand. Unsurprisingly, it was found that reviews are the most valued tool”, inspiring twice as much trust in brand than Likes” which hold little weight.
It was also revealed that consumers don’t expect trust to be supplied by the brand alone, instead there’s a preference for it to be gained through additional sources like content, with 71 per cent of consumers trusting brands that provide useful information without trying to sell them. And it’s good news for brands with plenty of expertise to offer, as 85 per cent of consumers trust brands that use ads or sponsored content to inform them and 79 per cent trust brands who work with content providers to offer solutions that are useful, unique or exclusive.”
Other things brands can do to inspire trust include understanding the consumers perspective, having a lot of positive user reviews but not hiding negative ones, being able to see reviews from people in their own social network, seeing photos of other people illustrating their own experience with the content and seeing how many Likes” a piece of content received.
You can read the full report here.