Successful Customer Service Managers Will Embrace Social Sharing

Enticing your customers to share your product within their social network is a winning tactic in the age of rising advertising costs, lower click-through rates and decreased trust in brands. But how do you get customers to share your product, and, more importantly, how do you track and monetize it?

Social sharing is growing at a rapid speed. Recently published data shows that the Facebook platform makes up 52% of all social sharing, and alternative networks like Twitter and Tumblr growing their individual social sharing rate exponentially.

Social sharing is the fundamental mechanic behind what makes a social network "social." It is also what amplifies your customers’ and prospects’ respective voices. Search engines like Google and Bing are looking into what’s being shared on social networks and are using it as a relevant signal to their search algorithms. If authentic users are sharing something, it must be relevant content, and search engines wants to deliver exactly that.

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Endorsements from your customers is highly trusted content

If you want visibility on a big social network you’ve a few options:

• Buy ads
• Create a Page
• Create an Application
• Entice your customers to share your content

Needless to say, it is ads that the social networks wants us to buy. Advertising is their primary sources of revenue, and it is what enables most social networks to offer their services for free.

However, whether the platform is called Facebook, Youtube or Twitter, advertising will always be perceived as advertising by its users. Social does not eradicate user tendencies to ignore advertising.

Above I’ve illustrated a typical newsfeed stream, this could be any social network as the principle is the same.

I’m not saying that advertising on these networks is not worth the investment, but don’t confuse it for any relationship building activity. You’re just buying ads!

You’re probably already good at advertising, so that’s not what we need to worry about now.

Equally, if you setup and run a branded Page, the messenger is you. It’s not paid advertising, it’s permission marketing based push content with some functionalities for having a dialogue. The problem remains that in most cases brands will treat this the same way they treat advertising space.

The real value lays in the trusted content from users’ trusted connections. The content may be sponsored or paid, but the messenger is a customer or a prospect of your brand. If done right, this heavily increases the trust of the content.

60% of consumers say they would share their purchase in return for a free perk

Social sharing is growing at rapid rate – In recent a study conducted by Beyond, 60% of the respondents said they would happily share a purchase on Facebook in return for a free perk.

Getting your customers to share their purchase, or the product they are considering, is obviously not for everyone. But as we’re getting more and more born digital natives into our buying demographic, this is going to increasingly cater to more people.

Make your product pages ready for social sharing

Making your product pages share friendly doesn’t only mean that you add share-buttons. You need to make sure that when people share your links on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ etc, they convey the right message (i.e. a proper thumbnail with description text and image included in your page meta-data).

Apple does this with excellence even though they, for some mysterious reason, haven’t embraced sharing buttons on their product pages.

This is how it looks like when you share the iPad2 main product page on Facebook:

Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ will render the thumbnails from your pages pretty much the same way. Twitter requires a bit more thinking through though.

Entice your customers to share

Getting your product pages ready for sharing with good meta-data for thumbnails and share friendly buttons is a good start. But how do you entice your customers (or prospective customers) to actually share your product page?

You’ll need to work on some kind of reward to the customer in return for the social share. This could either be a financial or non-financial reward.

Avalanshare.com (disclosure: Avalanshare is a client of the author) is one example of a tool that solves the problem of effectively monetizing and tracking your product pages social shares. But regardless of whether you use a tool like that or you develop something in-house, GoogleAnalyticsSocialInteractions, together with campaign tracked outgoing links, is your best friend when having to measure and report back on the performance.

About the author:

Joakim Nilsson have been in the digital space since 1997. During the last 7 years he held a number of positions within the online gambling industry, most recently as Head of Social media for Betclic Everest group, one of Europe’s largest online gambling groups.

Joakim is also an appreciated speaker at iGaming industry and social media conferences and has contributed to several articles on the topic of social media and online marketing. He also a member of the advisory board for Call Center IQ since 2010.

Joakim writes his own blog on Social business here: http://joakimnilsson.com