How your customers perceive your brand is a crucial factor for business, which has a lot to do with customer satisfaction. If your customer has a good experience with your business, they will have a positive perception of your brand as a whole, and are more likely to repeat business with you. In contrast, a negative customer perception makes your brand less appealing—or even unpleasant, in some cases—and can make customers steer clear from your business.
There are a lot of factors that affect customer perception, including product quality, delivery time, customer service, advertising, and social media. For this article, we will be focusing on the last one—how social media affects customer perception and what factors of social media largely affect customer perception.
The role of social media in customer perception
Any marketing agency will tell you that social media can make or break the success of your business, and this holds true for all types of business, regardless of size or age. When customers gain positive experiences from your social media pages, they are more likely to become loyal customers and recommend your business to others.
Striving for positive customer perception should start even before a customer purchases your business. Using social media, you can create a persona that resonates with your customers, provide content that brings them value, offer assistance when needed, and communicate consistently with your audiences. When done right, these efforts result in good customer experiences, which lead to positive customer perception.
The social media factors that affect customer perception
When you think of ways to improve customer perception of social media, you have to put yourself into a customer’s shoes. What are the things that can affect your customer experience? And stemming from that, how can these things affect your perception of the business?
Here are the factors of social media that can affect customer perception and how you can continuously improve them.
1. Visuals
From the first three seconds upon visiting a social media page, customers can already formulate an impression about the brand. For instance, if they land on a page with poorly-designed graphics and a bland logo, their impression of the business will already be negatively affected. In contrast, if they see a page with attractive, well-thought-out graphics, they are more likely to have a good impression of the brand from the first few seconds of browsing the page, which is crucial for their entire customer experience.
If your visuals are lacking, invest in graphic design services to breathe new life into your social media pages. Your logo, headers, photos, videos, and other graphics play the biggest role in a customer’s perception of your brand and should be given the most importance.
2. Response
No customer wants to deal with a business that takes forever to respond or, worse—does not respond at all. In the age of instant messaging, customers expect to receive an immediate response to their sales or marketing questions. And if they don’t receive a response right away or don’t receive a response at all, they can perceive your business as one that does not value their customers’ time.
Responding to customer messages can be a challenge, especially for small businesses. If you are struggling to stay on top of customer queries on social media, assign at least one person to respond to customers within one hour of messaging. However, if you don’t have a staff member to spare, consider outsourcing the task to a freelancer or a marketing service.
3. Content
Your content speaks volumes, especially on social media. What you post greatly affects how customers perceive your brand. Do you post engaging content that is valuable and entertaining at the same time? If so, your customers are more likely to want to see your posts on their feeds. But if you post content that is constantly boring and spammy, your customers will perceive your brand as bland, low-quality, and poorly curated.
Similar to visuals, invest in content creation if you want to produce engaging, high-quality posts that will bring value to your audiences. If you can’t do it yourself, hire someone or outsource to people that can create entertaining content in line with your products and industry.
4. Customer reviews
Potential customers want to see what others are saying about your business before they hand over their money. That said, you can use social media to show other’s experience with your business and thus curate a positive perception for other potential customers before they even buy from you.
Social media plays a huge factor in the success of your business, whether or not you are based online.
