Social media was created to keep in touch with that one friend you lost contact with, after school. When the design of cellular devices changed from a bulky box to a flat screen and the cost of data became affordable, the app market exploded along as well.

Currently, apps such as Twitter, Whatsapp and Facebook collectively have 11 billion downloads. This provides brands a massive opportunity to leverage these platforms to reach, respond and collect feedback from their respondents swiftly.

In this blog, we will explore the 5 ways how the use of social media can augment every brand’s marketing strategy:

1. Social Media apps enables brands to connect with customers on platforms they frequently use:

“There were several roads nearby, but it did not take Dorothy long to find the one paved with yellow bricks” – The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

 If you want to find the wizard, you follow the yellow brick road. When you want to reach your customer, you look for the medium that spend their time on. A lot of online communities are thriving on multiple social networking sites.

Facebook has 2.9 billion users worldwide. In the US alone in 2022, Facebook has about 182 million, Instagram about 130 million and Tiktok about 80 million users. Even WhatsApp boasts of 75 million monthly active users here.

 For brands, social media marketing is an opportunity to reach where their customers already are- on their most used platform with their style of conversation. It is easy, faster, familiar and makes businesses more relatable for their audience.

2. Social media apps have helped marketers find their customers:

A Facebook business page allows brands to connect with their Facebook users, give them information about their products, create and launch ad content and share event details. 

Prospects and customers can engage with the brand pages and build closer personal relationships with the brand, find information that will help them buy confidently, and even champion the brands that they love.

With paid ads, brands can target a very specific demographic within an allocated budget. Many brands can also reach out to influencers and create paid Instagram posts to showcase their products or services. In 2020, Facebook also introduced cross messaging feature with Instagram and Messenger. With Facebook Ads Manager, brands can also run ads on all of these social media account with the all-in-one ad tools provided by Meta.

3. Apps like Whatsapp and Messenger helped brands connect with customers meaningfully:

Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram come with specific business tools to help brands reach present their products to their consumers. Facebook is focusing on building a great experience for organization, shops and freelancers to use Whatsapp for Business. Professional Whatsapp profiles come with product catalogues, business hours and instant customer service. Whatsapp has also integrated payment processes inside the app. These instant messaging platforms are highly real-time in nature. So marketers can look to build their big or small businesses or conduct market research among the user base.

In this era of virtual shopping or e-commerce platforms, opting for messenger based survey is a faster method to hear from your respondents. Messenger surveys are reliable and easy to create, execute, collect and analyze data. To upgrade an all round customer service, current marketing efforts should focus on a strong social media presence.

4. Instagram, Facebook and Twitter enables Brands to connect with customers via rich media formats:

Plenty of social media users have a short attention span on these social platforms. The current attention span has reduced from 12 seconds to 8 seconds, courtesy the pandemic years.

According to Moz, the shelf life of one tweet is 18 minutes. The amount of social feed we thumb through daily will be equivalent to 300 feet.

Brands and creators on Instagram are following the algorithm and creating short form content for their fan base. Followers on Twitter are creating entertaining tweets that catch the eyes of various brands. Videos are a great way to share tutorial, how to navigate through a product, features of a product and add entertainment along with brand promotions or educative content. Overall, the conversations inside a social network is mainly user-generated content and this becomes a great way to analyze user behavior and preferences or collect customer feedback.

Brands such as Samsung share video content displaying the features of their smart watches. Uber also uses Instagram to share new features with their customers.

5. Social Media apps can swiftly collect customer feedback for faster resolution:

Social media is a great place to rely on for real time conflict resolution. Twitter, a popular microblogging site, does this the best!

Industries starting from food and beverage, airlines, electronics, ecommerce and telecommunications are taking this platform seriously. As per a survey done by Research Now UK, 83% of users got their grievances resolved on Twitter. As much as 96% of Twitter users had a friendly customer service experience and would be a repeat customer of the business.

Social media has become a great source of customer listening. The content generated by the customers has become a powerful source of feedback. The best brands around the world use social listening to actively capture this feedback and improve their products and services.

Social media is synonymous to speed, friendliness, and personalization – the three important pillars of a successful virtual customer service. With the right tools, your business can take advantage of social media platforms and collect customer feedback from your patrons.

A question of privacy policy while using social networking sites

Privacy is a major concern while using social networking sites. It is important to understand the privacy policies of the platform to protect your personal information. Most social media platforms have privacy settings that can be customized according to individual preferences.

On the other hand, brands need to adhere to privacy guidelines while collecting customer feedback, intimate information from an individual’s personal profile, launching messenger based or an email survey. One of the best practices would be to seek consent from respondents before grasping their feedback. Maintaining a transparency with how their data will be used, can help build trust among your customer base.

Merren has a robust feedback collection system that can empower brands to bring high response rate to their market research exercise. You can view survey analytics on our dashboard which can also be segregated as per filtered demographics. Now seamlessly deploy quick surveys or chat with your customers directly using instant messaging applications. With these new age tools ,you can easily collect customer feedback at every touchpoint.

If your business is looking for that leverage, Merren also provides a 14 day free trial. Grab this opportunity right away!