Here’s How Consumer Expectations are Changing for Brands on Social Media

A brand’s social media presence is inevitably going to end up being a pretty huge contributor to the kind of impact it will be able to have on the world, and with all of that having been said and now out of the way it is important to note that consumer preferences and expectations tend to change quite often. Brands need to stay up to date because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up enabling them to stay ahead of the curve rather than disappearing into obscurity without having become truly profitable.

Sprout Social has just released a number of trends that brands would ideally want to keep in mind. One thing that has become clear from this survey of about 1,000 consumers online is that the biggest concern appears to be with customer service. About 47% of respondents said that a brand’s customer service through social media platforms was the most important thing for them to end up taking into consideration.

Audience engagement and transparency seem to be important as well, with 46% and 44% of respondents agreeing that they mattered respectively. A really essential thing to note here is that only 17% of respondents said that pop culture references would make them think highly of a brand’s online social media presence. This is intriguing since brands tend to place a lot more importance in displaying pop culture savvy, but it seems that the vast majority of respondents did not seem to appreciate this at all.

Hence, brands might want to start pivoting to a more customer service oriented approach to their social media platforms. Sharing memes and quips about recent pop culture goings on will not get them the results that they are looking for, and quite on the contrary they may just make the brand seem rather disingenuous too which is obviously not something that the brand would want happening.

Getting people to follow them on social media should probably be high up on the list of priorities for any brand. The reason behind this is that 90% of respondents said that they would buy from a brand that they follow on social media, and on top of that 86% said that they would prefer the products of a brand that they followed over that of a competitor.

This indicates that social media accounts for brands should focus on making engaging and informative content and handle customer queries in a timely manner so that they can get more engagement from followers as well as increase their overall follower count which would subsequently lead to more success from a business perspective.



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