8 Proven Ways to Build Trust on Social Media [2024 Edition]

Building a successful brand is like maintaining a relationship. And to have a successful relationship, you have to build trust with your partner. 

Similarly, to have a successful business, you need to build trust with your clients, consumers, or target audience.

But gaining trust isn’t easy. 

It takes time and effort to win the trust of your audience and is hard to maintain. 

To gain trust from your customers or audience, you have to make them feel comfortable with your brand. You have to be consistent, transparent, and reliable to create a connection. 

This is where social media comes in. 

According to Oberlo, 71% of customers who had a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend the brand to their close ones. 

That means, if you can build a trustworthy relationship with your audience using social media, it will go a long way for your brand. 

But how to use social media in your brand’s favor? Well, read on to learn the tips. 

8 Ways to Build Trust For Your Brand Using Social Media

1. Create Great Content That Adds Value to Your Audience Life

The best way for a brand to build trust is to provide “value”. 

Now, value can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. But, when it comes to social media, giving value simply means: Creating great quality content that adds value to users’ life. 

In 2020, a co-study conducted by Influencer and globalwebindex stated that: 

• 51% of users follow a creator on social media to learn something new. 
• 38% of users follow to gain inspiration.
• 49% of users follow to watch entertaining or uplifting content

That means your audience goes online to either learn something new or for entertainment. 

So, if you want to add value to their lives, you have to create content that educates, entertains, and inspires. 

Value-added content acts as a solution for your audience’s pain points. It will help you build a strong relationship with them. 

You can take National Geographic’s Instagram platform as an example here. 

They utilized Instagram well by providing information content with beautiful photographs. Because of their informative captions currently, they’ve over 184m loyal followers. 

2. Be Consistent

Consistency is the ultimate key to gain trust for your brand on social media. 

To be successful in this digital world, you need to establish a strong presence on every social platform. 

Now, you won’t want your brand to send inconsistent messages on each social platform. To build trust, your brand’s message and personality must stay consistent throughout all the channels. 

Consistent brand presentation in all platforms increases revenue by 23%. If you maintain a consistent image on social media, the audience can easily recognize your brand. And, brand recognition is the first step to build a loyal audience base. 

So, don’t just share anything you want on social media. Share what’s relevant, authentic, and valuable to your users’ life. 

Find a consistent balance when posting on social platforms. You don’t have to post too much or show up once a month. You can use a post-scheduling tool to find a good balance when posting. 

Here we can talk about Nike’s social media presence as an example. The brand is known for its motivational voice. 

From the slogan “Just do it” to Inspiring posts featuring famous sports personalities, Nike has maintained consistency successfully across all platforms. 

3. Respond to Comments And Messages

83% of users like it when brands respond to their questions on social media. And, 72% of millennials stated that they’re more loyal to brands that respond to social media feedback. 

After all, the point of being active on social media is to be there for your audience. 

Why? 

Because being there for your audience shows your brand cares about their needs. Being responsive to their questions can increase brand loyalty. 

People on social channels can ask different questions related to your brand’s products and services. They can leave comments and DMs to interact. 

So, as a brand, it’s your responsibility to be quick to respond to their queries. 

You can even take your social engagement to the next level by posting comment-worthy content. Doing this will help you build trust and a positive brand image in the long run.

For example, Starbucks Coffee never fails to respond to the comments and feedback of its audience. Despite being one of the giant companies around the globe, they always give individual attention to their customers. 

Their customers never shy away from asking questions about their menus, services, store offers, and much more. To maintain a trustworthy relationship with their customers, Starbucks social media team are always quick with their responses. Here’s one example:

4. Interact With Your Audience

On social media, building trust is way more difficult than acquiring new followers. Audiences expect your brand to interact with them consistently to form a long-term relationship. 

However, most brands fail to live up to their audience expectations. According to Salesforce, 54% of customers reported that they feel they’re interacting with siloed departments. 

That’s why, to drive engagement and build a loyal customer base, you have to transform the way you interact on social media channels. Here are some ways you can use:

• Run a contest: You can organize different contests to interact with your audience. For example, invite your followers to post something funny on Twitter. The funniest tweets will get a free offer, discount, or bonus points. 
• Play fun games: Play fun games like quizzes, polls to add entertainment to your social channels. For instance, Nickelodeon uses Instagram stories to post fun polls. This way, they’re successfully managing to gain trust from the audience.

• Run giveaways: You can also run giveaways to strengthen audience trust. In fact, 61% of customers reported surprise offers and gifts are the best way to increase customer engagement. 

So, you can host Facebook or Instagram giveaways. For example, ask your audience to leave a comment telling “why they should win” or “tag the person they’d like to share the giveaway price with”. 

You can provide a free service, free product, coupon cards, offers, free trial, and much more as a giveaway price. 

5. Don’t Hard Sell on Your Social Media

How many times have you unfollowed brands on social media that constantly show up with their promotional posts? Probably a hundred times? 

Because the hard-selling approach never goes well on social media.

We know it’s tempting to push sales messages and self-promoting posts when you have a few followers on social media. 

You think talking about your product or services on social media posts can help you win customers. But, the reality is far different! 

Nobody goes online to receive your advertisements or sales pitches. Your ‘salesy’ content doesn’t add any value. This means the hard-selling approach won’t help you build trust in the long run.

You have to show up consistently with valuable content that highlights the needs and expectations of your audience. 

Also, to gain trust, listen to the challenges and issues your followers face. Read their feedback, comments, posts to understand what their pain points are. And finally, tell them how your products or services can solve those challenges. 

6. Share Your Customer Testimonial & Results

When you purchase something online, what’s the first thing you consider? 

Reviews and recommendations from customers, the price, or something else? 

Of course, you look for the reviews first. 

Customer testimonials, reviews serve as social proof. And human beings tend to make decisions based on social proof. 

According to Sproutsocial, 40% of customers follow brands online based on recommendations from friends and family. And 91% of customers read online reviews before purchasing something. 

That’s the power of social proof or testimonials. It helps you gain trust and a lot of sales. 

There are tons of ways you can use social media to share social proof, for example:

When a social media user leaves feedback on your posts, don’t keep it to yourself. Let your followers know by retweeting or sharing feedback on all your social media platforms.

You can take Slack’s Twitter profile as an example here. Slack created a Twitter account called @SlackLoveTweets to share their follower’s love with the world. They retweet all the positive feedback from their users to build trust and authority.

Another way to build brand trust is by sharing user-generated content. Your customers are your biggest marketer. So, use user-generated content as social proof to build trustworthy relationships with your followers.

A quick heads up: User-generated content means photos, videos, and other content that your customers created using your product or service. This type of content is more trustworthy as real customers and not your brand share them. 

One of the best examples of brands using user-generated content on social media is GoPro. 

GoPro encourages their customers to shoot a photo or video using their products, doing things they love. The best photo or video gets rewarded by GoPro with exposure, cash, and gear. 

This challenge increases the purchase and helps to show their camera’s quality and build trust among the users. 

7. Show The Behind The Scenes

57% of consumers feel trust, and 86% of consumers appreciate authenticity in brands, according to Renderforest Survey 2020. 

And what’s the best way to gain trust than showing the behind-the-scenes (BTS) of a company? 

Posting BTS content on social media can help you show the real side of your brand. With BTS videos or images, your audience can quickly humanize with the products and services offered by your brand. 

As a loyal customer, your audience deserves to know who they’re purchasing from. They want to connect with your brand. With BTS content, you can show them:

The process goes behind building a product. 

You can also share the BTS image of your employees to make your brand relatable and human. 

You can provide updates on your future projects or upcoming product launch to share your progress. 

This way, you’ll develop trust and real connections with the audience. 

Let’s take the example of General Electric here. The brand has been around for more than 125 years. The GE team managed to gain trust throughout the years by sharing behind-the-scenes videos and photos related to their products, work process, and innovation. 

The best part is while sharing this content; they allow their employees to be the face and show off their work.

8. Add Some Humor And Fun

Building trustworthy relationships with your customers don’t have to be a boring process. You can always sparkle a bit of fun in your social media strategy. 

Fun interaction is what you need if you want to build trust using social media channels. As per SproutSocial, 3 in 4 consumers appreciate humor from brands. After all, a brand’s fun personality makes them relatable and natural in the audience’s eyes.  

So, to form a strong, trustworthy relationship with your audience, add some humor and fun into your social media content. Add humor into your comments, tone of voice, audience interactions. 

Be playful with your responses on every social media platform. If you receive a negative comment or feedback from your follower, reply with a witty tone. 

However, make sure to maintain a balance while adding humor. Don’t try to act too funny as it will make your brand appear irritating.

Old Spice is a great example of brands using humor on social media. While posting videos or writing captions, they keep a witty, funny tone that makes the brand more relatable. 

Wrapping Up

So, that’s a wrap-up. These are the 8 surefire ways to build a strong, trustworthy relationship with your customers on social media.

As we’ve already mentioned, brand trust can have a huge impact on your business growth. It can even make or break your brand reputation. 

So, you must maintain special care while forming a relationship with the customers. 

And remember, building trust is a long-term process. Try different strategies consistently to see what suits your brand. 

So, ready to establish trust for your organization? Use our tips and let us know which one worked the best for you in the comments!