1. Community managers (and their agencies) live and breathe social media

If your job is not living and breathing social media 24/7,  chances are you are not able to keep up with what’s happening on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, etc.  While adding the odd tweet and keeping an eye on Facebook comments might be manageable, you might not have time to do a great deal more.

Creating content calendars that ensure that every post is optimized to create the maximum impact and ensuring that your Twitter account follows all the key influentials in your market may be enough to fill your day.

Also ask yourself if you are keeping up with the latest Facebook competition rules? Or working out how the Twitter API changes could impact your brand’s output? And what about other platforms – should you be focusing on Google+ this year or Pinterest?

Community managers will be up-to-date on all platforms, what they can offer and how they can potentially work best for your brand. It is their job after all. Why not let the experts worry about the finer details?

2. Community managers can offer a fresh perspective

Sometimes working on one specific thing or brand can make things jaded after a while. Outsourcing your social media efforts will invite a fresh perspective to the table and stimulate discussion around the brand and how to make it stand out in the fast-changing social media sphere.

Your community manager will have worked on or read about other branded online campaigns. They know what has worked in the past, what could work in the future, and what could potentially be a social media disaster.

They will also be able to advise on and devise the social media strategy that is essential to ensure your brand flourishes online and offline.

3. Community managers are enthusiastic about what they do and will be backed up by a team

If you divide the community management duties between individuals in your company, chances are the actual management of the online entities end up falling through the cracks as other tasks take precedence.

Also, unless proper guidelines are set, your brand’s social voice and tone could end up being fragmented across the social media entities.

An agency can provide the important neutrality good community management requires and will have a team set to ensure your community management is kept consistent regardless of summer holidays or staff turnover. They have also actively pursued this career, so will be eager to do it well.

Finally let’s not forget one very important thing. If you outsource your community management then you can be assured that your Facebook pages will always be updated and that someone is responding to questions on Twitter and other social networks in a timely and coordinated manner.

Your brand won’t be joining the thousands of others whose Facebook and Twitter accounts lay dormant and are an embarrassment to the company and the staff that were supposed to populate them.

According to eMarketer, the  new report, “Social Loyalty: From Rewards to a Rewarding Customer Experience,” analyzes findings from dozens of third-party research providers and interviews with industry executives.  Here are some of the best practices for improving social  loyalty.

Why? Because many traditional loyalty programs are not highly effective, eMarketer notes. While loyalty programs have been popular in the US for years—with the average American consumer belonging to 18 loyalty programs according to loyalty marketing publisher COLLOQUY—it is not clear how many of these consumers are actually active.

eMarketer further notes that points, coupons and freebies are great for grabbing initial attention.  But in the long run these promotions can’t make up for a lackluster customer experience. However, through the use of social media, retailers and brands can identify and interact with the most profitable internet users.  And for the first time ever, social networks such as Facebook makes it easier for businesses to acquire new customers through social loyalty programs.  Why?  Loyalty can be won through encouraging word-of-mouth and creating advocates or evangelists, by raising a user’s social status, by surprising and entertaining shoppers in unexpected ways and also by listening to customers’ needs and suggestions and responding in a mutually beneficial fashion.  Brands that most often succeed typically encourage sharing, raise customers’ social status, develop highly entertaining loyalty programs, and listen and respond to feedback quickly.  Social loyalty programs provide brands with an unprecedented amount of customer data, both online and offline.

Here are 12 brands identified by Econsultancy that used such principles and have worked.  You might want to test them out yourself for your own brand and explore.

Social Proof

One of the most effective things you can bring to your site to increase the confidence of buyers is ‘social proof’. Social proof is the phenomena where people tend to believe that the decision and actions of others reflect the correct behavior in a specific situation.  So, we have to create an experience which convinces our visitors they’re not the only person making this decision.

Basecamp Social Proof Techniques

Basecamp

In this design we see a prominent mention of the sheer number of other people who have made the same purchasing decision that the visitor is considering.

Raven SEO Tools

One of the most common ways to integrate social proof into your site is by including testimonials into your site, especially if you can include a picture of the person providing the social proof. Software as a Service (SaaS) companies are the kings of this. But it’s a sensible addition to most B2B sites and can also work well in B2C environments.

Wish.co.uk

There’s a huge number of clever CRO techniques in place on this page but we want to highlight one of the easiest ways to implement social proof into your site, using the off-the-shelf Facebook Like button/widget. It really simply shows you the profile pictures of other people who’ve liked that page on Facebook, also prioritizing those who are connected the to the visitor of the site.

It is not just social proof, but personalised social proof. Actually it’s even better than that.  It’s automated personalised social proof.

Groupon

Yes Groupon. It might have been getting a lot of stick recently but it, more than nearly every other major internet business, has a deep understanding of human behavior. Here it illustrates how they’ve built social proof into the very DNA of its business.

By showing how many other people have bought the same offer,  Groupon hopes to persuade the visitor to do the same, and place an order.

Loss Aversion

The disutility of giving up an object is greater than the utility associated with acquiring it.  This  is known an Loss Aversion. ‘Disutility’ simply means that human tendency prefers not to lose  something more than we love to gain something. Sometimes this is about a subtle re-framing of your copy to concentrate on loss rather than gain. We need to ask ourselves ‘How can we make visitors think they’d be losing something if they don’t buy?’.

Agoda

Many travel websites are particularly good at communicating loss aversion.  A good example is Agoda. It makes it clear what you would lose if you don’t book now. This serves to instantly increase urgency.

Qwertee

Qwertee has built an understanding of human behavior right into its business model. Its t-shirts are only available for 48 hours and after the first 24 the price increases. Every time you visit the site  there’s a huge ticking clock showing exactly what you’re going to miss out on if you don’t purchase soon.

Amazon

Amazon is the king of using cognitive biases to increase conversion rates. One particular example where it uses loss aversion is for its ‘Prime’ customers. Prime users are a subset of their most frequent customers who have paid upfront fees to have access to next day delivery by default. If you’re a signed-in Prime customer, every product you visit that has next day delivery reminds you how long you’ve got before that day’s cut-off point.

Argos

It’s not just online giants like Amazon making use of our innate loss aversion to increase purchases. High street retailer Argos taps into our aversion to loss to drive footfall to its shops using this clever lightbox.

Anchoring

One of my favourite cognitive biases that influences the way behave, is known as anchoring. It is the tendency to rely too heavily – or ‘anchor’ – on a past reference or on one trait or piece of information when making decisions. These anchors can often be numerical. Our challenge is to ask ‘How can I reference an ‘anchor’ that influences visitors to my site?’.

Hotels.com

One of the oldest anchoring tricks in the book is what the price was reduced from. Cross-hatched higher prices showing the available discount is a simple way to anchor the price of an item and make it seem better value.

Mailchimp

SaaS companies like MailChimp often make use of a clever anchoring technique that more businesses should be wise to try and use. You’ll notice they have one high price that’s much higher than all the other price points. This maybe be because it’s a popular option.  However many anchoring experiments have found introducing one higher price point can lead to people spending more in total even if nobody chooses that option.

This concept is worth repeating because it is a bit counter-intuitive: Adding an extra expensive option to your page can increase the average order value of the page even if nobody selects that option.  This is because it makes your other expensive options seem less expensive. This is one that’s well worth testing.

Broadband.co.uk

There’s also a case of possible anchoring taking place on the homepage of Broadband.co.uk, where the BT offer is significantly more expensive than the other options. That’s because the package is very different to the others. If we believe in the principle of anchoring, this may be increasing the value of the traffic to this page by encouraging them to assess the relative value of the other options differently.

Wiggle

Adding related products to a page can be a great way to increase the number of items people add to a basket. There’s also a possibility that the selection of these products might also have an anchoring influence. We don’t expect too many retailers bear price anchoring in mind with their related product algorithm, but it’s something you would expect some retailers to have tested.

As we noted at the beginning of this article, we don’t always know in every case that these changes have been implemented to increase conversion rates.  However,  if we understand human behavior and some of our cognitive biases, they would certainly seem worthy efforts to try.

There are several psychological reasons why stories are so powerful.    

• Humans are narrative creatures by nature.  And stories have always been a primal form of communication.  They connect us to a self larger than us and to universal truths. They bring us back to ancient traditions, legends, archetypes, myths, and symbols.  They also transcend generations.
• Stories are about human connection and relatedness. They engage us through emotions of joys, laughter, sadness, hardships and passions. Stories allow us to understand ourselves better, to find our commonality with others and overcome differences, to share meaning and purpose in the different aspects of our lives.
• Stories reveal our thought processes and how we make meanings of life.  Psychologists use different names such as mental schemas, scripts, cognitive mapping, mental models, metaphors, or narratives.  Nevertheless, they all lead to a common purpose — We use stories to explain how things work, how we make decisions, how we justify our decisions, how we persuade others, how we understand and define ourselves, and how we teach human values such as responsibility, commitment, compassion, and the like.
• Stories can be therapeutic and provide order.  People seek certainty and this is a universal truth.  And narratives offer a structure that is familiar, predictable, and comforting. Within the context of the story, we can withstand intense emotions because we know that resolution follows the conflict. Narratives can provide solutions and a safety net.  In my private practice, I have used stories to help children gain mastery and overcome some of their intense experiences (e.g., separation anxiety, low self-esteem), fears and emotions that can be too overwhelming.
• Stories can be gateways that tap into our right brain and trigger our imagination. Through imagination, we become participants in the narratives. We can step out of our own shoes, see things differently, and increase our empathy and compassion for others. Through imagination, we think outside the box and harness our creativity that is the foundation of innovation, self-discovery and change.

In the context of social media, organizations, causes, brands or individuals identify and develop a core story.  They create and display authentic meaning and purpose that others can believe in, participate with, and share. Stories are so important today because there is SO much information out there and stories can serve as an effective filtering agent. Good stories will get someone to pay attention without clicking on the next link, changing the channel, or flipping the page. So what makes up a “good and powerful”  story? Most good stories will have the following elements:

• Must have a Clear message (be engaging with tension or drama to evoke a powerful emotional experience
• Mush have a Powerful introduction
• Be Authentic
• Be Relevant
• May or may not have a call to action

George Silverman, a psychologist, pioneered word-of-mouth marketing when he created what he called “teleconferenced peer influence groups” in order to engage physicians in dialogue about new pharmaceutical products. Silverman noticed an interesting phenomenon while conducting focus groups with physicians in the early 1970s. “One or two physicians who were having good experiences with a drug would sway an entire group of skeptics. They would even sway a dissatisfied group of ex-prescribers who had negative experiences!”

Now that we are in the online space, Digital Word-of-mouth marketing can influence the consumers’ buying decision. All of us are influenced by the word-of-mouth in one way or the other. Just think back to the time you asked for advice or an opinion from your friends and peers before purchasing a relatively expensive commodity. Or think about the last time you did online research to finalize your service provider or to purchase a product.  In my case, by default, I would read online reviews from previous customers when buying things at Amazon or Ebay for instance.  All these are the outcomes of  the digital word-of-mouth marketing.

So, let’s go a step ahead and explore what modes of digital word of mouth marketing are available to us:

1. Share with a Friend

Social networking websites provide us a great platform to connect with our family and friends located anywhere across the globe. Facebook,LinkedIn, Twitter etc. have now become a part and parcel of our daily lives. Happy, sad or confused- our status can spread the word within our network.   For example: – on purchase of every product from your website, give an option to your customers to share that with their connections on the social networking websites.

2. Reviews & Testimonials

Whether going out to dine at a restaurant, or about to purchase a laptop, or intending to hire a web consultant, etc., we all tend to go through the testimonials, reviews and ratings prior to making our purchase.  This is the power of asking for a review or a testimonial from a customer .  The previous buyer would give a review, which can then be shared with others.  This would be a good referral mechanism to build trust on your company without incurring additional costs.  These testimonials serve as effective marketing collateral for your website that can potentially increase more traffic to your website or fanpage.

3. Fan Page

Creating a Facebook fan page is an excellent and cost-efficient way to connect with your clients, prospects and business partners. A number of activities can be done through Facebook apps that can aid you in doing your digital word-of-mouth marketing.  Things such as status updates on Facebook, adding photos and videos to catch the eye of the target group, creating events and inviting your fans to attend, interactive activities such as games, online contests, promotions, etc. to engage your fans and the like, are some of the ways to do viral marketing organically through Facebook.

These are just some of the online ways of opportunities to do digital word-of-mouth marketing. For businesses, customer evangelism using entrenched advocates is one of the most affordable marketing channels; yet it provides some of the highest return on investment. More and more companies expand their reach thanks to the help of existing customers.  And the existence of Social Media like Facebook only allows the WOMM to grow virally in an exponential way.  This is what Social Loyalty or Digital Word-of-Mouth Marketing is all about.