In today’s marketing environment, people want to see brands that feel “real” and not like empty entities simply trying to sell to them. A big part of establishing that “realness” is social media authenticity, as the voice and creative you use on these platforms can help you build a strong connection with your target audiences.
In this blog, Ignite Visibility’s Social Media Manager, Katya Shakarian, will detail the importance of authenticity in social media, along with some examples and guidance demonstrating how to be authentic with your content.
What You’ll Learn:
- The Power of Authenticity in Social Media
- Understanding Authentic and Relatable Content
- Benefits of Authentic Content
- Industry Best Practices for a Brand Authenticity Strategy
- Implementing Authentic Strategies
- Challenges and How to Overcome Them
- FAQs
My Expert Opinion on Social Media Authenticity
With so many brands out there vying for people’s attention, along with the rise of short-form video content, more and more audiences are looking for authentic brand experiences with relatable content.
Further cementing the need for authentic marketing is the fact that around 70% of consumers spend more on authentic brands. So, what does it mean to be authentic? In short, this content is transparent, genuine, and consistent to establish a long-lasting relationship with target audiences.
By humanizing your brand and sharing your company’s culture with new and existing customers, you can build more trust and loyalty, contributing to a stronger community and greater engagement over time.
The Power of Authenticity in Social Media
Genuineness and authenticity are critical in all types of content today. Just consider how 64% of consumers want brands to establish a real connection with them, and 70% of people feel more of that kind of connection when a brand’s CEO is active on social media.
People want their favorite brands to feel human and align with their values. While high-quality, polished content can make your brand feel professional and build trust to an extent, it’s better to be authentic with content that feels like it comes from real people with real values.
Building genuine connections with audiences will establish you as an industry authority as you work to maximize visibility and engagement with your content, especially on social media. Knowing how to be more authentic on the channels you use will go a long way in building lasting connections, ultimately leading to more sales and better customer retention.
Understanding Authentic and Relatable Content
To get the best results from your social media strategy, you should create a balance of authenticity and relatability in your posts and other content.
Authenticity of content refers to its transparency, sincerity, and truthfulness. Does your brand come across as genuine, or does it have an air of deceptiveness? Authenticity can significantly increase trust and credibility as you express your values and mission.
Yogurt brand Chobani is one brand that effectively uses authenticity on social media to build a connection with audiences. For instance, the company posted on X about its efforts to provide free meals to students during Spring Break, discussing the involvement of more than 50 of its employees who were actively supporting the cause.
At the same time, you want your content to be relatable to your audiences. Relatability puts you at your audience’s level, showing that you value their experience. By relating to your audience, you can further strengthen your connection and demonstrate how your offerings will improve their lives in personal ways.
One example of a brand that has implemented relatability in addition to authenticity is The North Face, which has used social media posts to showcase its customers’ stories when wearing the company’s jackets.
Keep in mind that platforms like YouTube are favoring authentic marketing when determining what content gets monetized. This is another key reason to move away from mass-produced, repetitive content.
Benefits of Authentic Content
It’s crucial to understand the importance of brand authenticity and how it can positively affect your business.
Here are some of the main advantages of social media authenticity:
Increased Trust and Loyalty
One of the primary benefits of authenticity in social media is the ability to build more trust and credibility, attracting new customers while keeping your existing ones loyal.
Dove is a brand that is particularly well-known for working to increase trust and loyalty with its “Self-Esteem Project,” formerly known as the “Real Beauty” campaign. Much of this content incorporates short-form videos of its customers and real people with the message of boosting self-esteem and confidence.
Within a decade of launching this campaign, Dove saw sales increase from $2.5 billion to more than $4 billion.
Enhanced Engagement and Reach
Another benefit is the ability to keep your audience more engaged and expand your reach to new audiences.
Nike is one of the most popular brands known for taking steps to boost engagement and reach through authenticity on social media.
The company is a master storyteller that has managed to connect its brand values and offerings with all types of audiences, including athletes with diverse backgrounds and aspirations. Nike often posts behind-the-scenes content showcasing athletes’ real lives while using Nike products, with an emphasis on resilience that speaks to many audiences.
Its content is also often relatable, connecting the lifestyle of athletes to everyday customers.
Improved SEO Through Genuine Interactions
Social media authenticity also has the ability to improve your organic performance with better overall SEO, especially when you have a lot of tagged user-generated content (UGC) backing your strategy.
For example, many people who use GoPro cameras tag the company, contributing to its Instagram and other social media profiles. GoPro can then rank for these posts on the platform in addition to its own posts.
Industry Best Practices for a Brand Authenticity Strategy
With a better understanding of the importance of brand authenticity, implement the following best practices to guide your next strategy:
- Maintain a Consistent Brand Voice: One essential element that can build more trust among audiences is a consistent, well-defined brand voice—establish a unique persona that speaks for your brand and its values, using the same language and messaging across all platforms, from social media and your website to PPC ads across the web.
- Use Storytelling Techniques: Another step to take to get the most from your authentic content is to tell a story with your content. For instance, you could consider the perspective of a particular audience segment and their experience, exploring their pain points to empathize with them while ending the story with your brand as the solution.
- Leverage User-Generated Content: UGC is also highly effective at connecting with audiences, focusing on genuine brand experiences while providing you with plenty of content that you can repurpose for your own marketing efforts. Branded UGC could also help significantly with SEO.
Implementing Authentic Strategies
Here are some steps to take to help you develop your next brand authenticity strategy:
1. Define Your Values and Mission
First, consider what you want to achieve with your brand and the values that can align with your target audience. You might focus on sustainability, efficiency, affordability, or supporting communities. Your mission should then clearly establish your values and come across in all of your content.
Buffer
Social media management platform Buffer saw the value of authenticity in social media when it introduced its 10 core values. Since then, the company has expressed these same values on social media through its genuineness and authenticity infused in nearly every post.
As a result of this initiative and the company’s shift toward a message of transparency, the company saw a 49.7% increase in annual recurring revenue the same year it unveiled its core values.
2. Understand Your Audience
Conducting in-depth research into your target market is also essential and could influence the kinds of values you want to make your focus. Look at what competitors are doing through authentic experiences and see if there are any content gaps you could fill.
Patagonia
Yet another brand that knows how to be authentic with social media content is clothing company Patagonia, which has established itself as a sustainable company looking to promote eco-friendly solutions for a better environment.
For instance, Patagonia takes to Instagram to take a closer look at personalities who speak to the company’s values, such as this repair professional who fixes clothing items from landfills and sells them to customers across the globe.
Patagonia also continues to prove the profitability of sustainable organizations that speak to their audience’s values, with the company’s annual revenue at around $100 million and an estimated value of over $3 billion.
3. Tell a Story
Harness the power of brand storytelling to craft narratives that your audiences find relatable, appealing to their emotions through power words and audiovisual components. For example, you could use humor or sympathy to connect with your audience as you put your customers on the hero’s journey, which should lead to your brand.
Culver’s “Thank You Farmers” Project
Another example highlighting the importance of brand authenticity is quick-service restaurant chain Culver’s, which in recent years launched its “Thank You Farmers” project, which shows appreciation for local farmers and their communities through social media and other content.
In the process of raising money for local farmers and food banks, Culver’s also showed how it values the quality of products that its customers consume and imbued the brand with a sense of community.
As a result of Culver’s efforts, the company managed to raise over $5 million while boosting trust and loyalty.
4. Maintain Transparency
People want brands to come across as honest and open, which you should consistently do in your content. For example, you could feature members of your team and their real-life stories that can relate to customers’ experiences, putting a face to your brand while further connecting with audiences.
5. Use the Right Tools to Create and Measure Content
When you’re ready to produce your content, it’s important to use the right tools for content creation and creative design, such as:
- Canva for graphic design
- Google Trends to see what your audiences are discussing or searching for
- Grammarly to assist with tone and maintaining your voice across content
- AI tools like ChatGPT to give you story ideas that give your content a clear direction
You should also integrate tools like Google Analytics 4 in addition to social media platform analytics to gauge the performance of your efforts. You can see which posts and other content generate the most clicks and other forms of engagement, along with search engine rankings and other insights.
Based on performance against your goals, you can determine how to further optimize your strategy.
Challenges and How to Overcome Them
There are multiple challenges that come with maintaining social media authenticity. Here are some common ones and how to avoid them:
- Adapting Your Voice to Different Platforms: One common challenge is maintaining a consistent voice while adapting to the language and visuals that work best on each platform. To overcome this challenge, see how you can maintain certain elements of your brand voice and adapt them to each platform, such as using slightly different language while conveying the same general brand identity and image with your consistent message.
- Avoiding Oversharing: Although you want to add a personal touch to your content, you don’t want to overshare, as this can make your brand appear more unprofessional or even put others’ privacy at risk. Find a balance between a personal touch and sharing too much information.
- Authentic Crisis Management: In the event your business comes under fire for any reason, it’s important to know how to stay authentic while resolving a potential crisis. Try not to be too defensive or dismissive, instead addressing any problems and expressing your desire for continual improvement.
- Maintaining Relevance: As industry and social media trends rapidly change and evolve, you will need to keep up with these changes. You can do so by looking into what your audience is interested in and your competitors’ content, giving you ideas to help you pivot as needed.
- Staying Authentic at Scale: As your business grows, begins to target more platforms, and posting becomes more frequent, it can be challenging to maintain the same level of authenticity across all content. However, brand guidelines and a consistent approach to content creation can keep things manageable, especially if you delegate content creation and posting to multiple team members.
FAQs
1. What is authentic content in social media marketing?
Authentic content is the kind of content that establishes a mix of transparency and honesty, conveying a sense of genuineness and speaking to the company’s values. In other words, it makes a brand seem more human, especially when that content is relatable to the target audience.
2. How does authentic content impact SEO?
Through the development of UGC and high-quality content that people engage with regularly, you can use the authenticity of content to increase rankings within social media platforms and on search engines.
3. How can brands create relatable content?
Brands can create content that’s genuine and relatable by learning about their audience’s personal experiences and speaking to them within their content. For instance, an outdoor clothing brand could create content around the different audience segments and their individual experiences in the outdoors, empathizing with audiences.
4. What are examples of successful authentic marketing campaigns?
There are plenty of examples of brands exemplifying how to be more authentic, such as:
- Fenty Beauty’s use of UGC to demonstrate how its customers use its beauty products in their everyday lives
- Chipotle’s willingness to get into the social media trends that appeal to its audience while also promoting sustainability across its content
- ModCloth’s use of customer-generated content highlighting its many customers’ diverse styles
Experience the Benefits of Social Media Authenticity With Ignite Visibility
Want to get the best results from your authentic and relatable content? Ignite Visibility can learn the ins and outs of your brand to determine how to approach social media content the right way. We’ll incorporate your values, vision, and mission into all social media content, with consistent posting and measurement to gauge the results of your efforts.
You’ll benefit from working with us in a number of ways:
- Identify your target audience through in-depth research
- Determine a clear mission and a set of values that can inform content
- Develop high-quality organic social and paid media content with your brand voice and visuals
- Continually measure the results to guide ongoing optimization
- And more!
Get in touch with our experts today and request a free proposal.
