Business Transparency on Social Media and Its Advantages

Social media strengthens its position in marketing every day. Each business that conducts marketing operations on social media prioritizes being the first pick. You can achieve that through business transparency in social media and improve your brand. How can a trusting environment be achieved between businesses and customers? Is it essential to be transparent? How can a company be transparent and maintain it?

What Is Transparency on Social Media?

Transparency is seen as the most effective indicator in marketing. Transparency in marketing is a strategy to encourage customers to contact your brand by following the brand’s faces and development closely. Through a transparency strategy on social media, the more information you give to your customers, the more trust you build toward your brand. 

What Is Business Transparency?

Business transparency is being honest with your customers about in-house events and improvements. Companies that value business transparency publicly share information such as company revenue, performance, business values, and pricing.  

Businesses can succeed with improvements if they establish a trust bond with customers. Besides that, the bond between companies and investors is also crucial. As a business, the more transparent you are with investors, the easier it will be for you to get an investment. Entrepreneurs and investors need each other’s wants and needs. Therefore, creating transparent relationships to ensure safe communication is essential in all aspects. 

What Are the Benefits of Business Transparency on Social Media?

Transparency has a vital share in business development. Allowing your customers to see your work behind the scenes through transparent communication enables them to establish more intimate relationships with you. According to the research, 53% of customers prefer transparent brands on social media. That affects customer loyalty positively. When you consider that 86% of consumers choose more transparent brands, businesses with a transparency strategy are certainly one step ahead of their competitors. 

How Can Business Transparency on Social Media Lead to Customer Trust?

Social media is one of the best places for businesses to be most transparent to their customers. Q&A sessions, information about the campaign, interactive conversations, and many more on social media strengthen the transparency connections between the business and the customer.

The social media connection occurs not only between the business and the customer but also between the customers. Customers are consumers who influence each other. Therefore, a customer that’s pleased with brand transparency might become your investment in advertising. That increases brand awareness through word-of-mouth marketing and establishes trust between customers. 

According to the survey based on an adult audience, two things form the customers’ perception of transparency: Admitting mistakes and answering customer questions correctly. Businesses with these attitudes can establish a bond of trust with customers firmly. Brands can boost this trust through videos or presentations on how they produce their products and services. It is also effective to answer customer questions honestly and correctly. 

Examples of Brands That Have Achieved Success With Transparent Marketing Campaigns

Consumers and employees now prefer brands with a transparent attitude. At this point, we can exemplify three brands that struggle with transparency and finally succeed:

Buffer

Buffer is a social media management platform that offers regular management applications for businesses. Buffer adopted a transparent strategy by sharing the salary rate with the public. At the same time, it has established a transparent system with an accessible email mechanism. As a result, all emails have become accessible and trackable by everyone. This way, in-house notifications started to be shared with everyone simultaneously. This proved Buffer is a brand that attaches great importance to transparency in business.

Mcdonald’s

McDonald’s is one of the leading food chain companies in the world. The company has been struggling with misinformation and misconception about the food and ingredients for a long time. At this point, McDonald’s created the “Our Food” campaign and collected all customer questions to answer.

One of the most curious questions was about the meat quality. To clarify this question, McDonald’s published a video that shows all stages of their meat processing. In addition, they correctly responded to comments and criticisms from customers, both with video and replies. This way, they could gain the trust of their customers by answering all the questions transparently.

Starbucks

When it comes to food, consumers want to know what they exactly eat or drink. For this reason, Starbucks created the “Traceability” tool. This new web-based platform allowed customers to learn more about the journey of their coffee by scanning the code on the back of a particular coffee bag. This way, all stages in their operations, from A to Z, are shown to their customers, so consumers can see where the coffee was produced, roasted, and packaged. With this move, Starbucks proved its quality and created a bond of trust through a transparent attitude toward its customers.

How Can Companies Maintain Business Transparency?

Building a transparent company and work environment is possible theoretically. However, some obstacles might be encountered in the application. You can make an effort with particular strategies to maintain transparency. You can check out four strategies to maintain transparency:

Determine Your Building Blocks

Determining some building blocks for transparent communication ensures a better service for businesses. However, your managers and employees should adopt the determined building blocks. Building blocks such as honesty and fairness in communication enable your company to achieve its goals transparently. Companies’ understanding of transparency provides organized management and marketing. Building blocks like open communication and a fair approach help protect and maintain your business transparency.

Create a Communication Portal

Creating a communication portal can be beneficial for maintaining transparency for those companies that aim to organize and open systems. Sharing this portal’s latest incidents and activities helps you maintain clarity and adopt an open communication model. Employees can express their opinions openly in groups where team members are together.

Additionally, you can create a different channel for non-work conversations to strengthen the bonds between your employees. Businesses can interactively share with any unit they need to share information. Team meetings are crucial to take transparency to higher levels with the help of customer wants and needs. This way, managers can consider these demands and requirements and make more precise decisions. 

Create a Digital Platform

You can simultaneously convey information to each unit in your business through a digital system. You can ensure transparency in communication by acquiring the right tools. A system in which you can follow the processes together in case of any problems, including the suppliers, reveals the transparency between the units. Since operations on each product or service return as feedback, businesses can follow the improvement. This way, misunderstandings, and glitches can be eliminated through a transparent system. 

Communicate Directly

Transparency is among the priorities that shouldn’t be ignored in forming a secure bond between businesses and customers. Companies enable the evaluation of all developments, good or bad, with transparency. Regular and interactive communication between business and customers, comprehensive work, and transparency are vital for two-way relationships. The communication should be in order, openly and honestly. Otherwise, transparency is not possible. Communicating updates and exchanging ideas at any time helps ensure a business that’s open to improvement while maintaining business transparency.

Your Transparency Tool in Business Management: Juphy

Transparency has become one of the fundamental criteria for maintaining business development. Therefore, it is evident that businesses with an effective transparency strategy can achieve success. In addition, transparency is also crucial for good community management.

You can provide your team with an efficient and transparent process through Juphy’s team collaboration, reports, automation rules, canned responses, a white-label help desk, working space, and social inbox features. Start your 7-day free trial with Juphy to meet its other highly acclaimed features!

Related Article – Why Your Business Needs a Social Inbox

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