By Davis Upton
In today’s highly connected network environment, the common use of social media is changing the environment for branding. The interactive, participatory, and open natures of social media offer brands the opportunity to connect online content to consumers. This allows brands to catch the consumer’s attention through multiple brand social media strategies in digital.
Some common brand social media response strategies to increase digital customer engagement involve non-verbal and verbal cues generated or created by enterprises on social media. Response strategies consist of three categories:
(1) Affective response identified with emojis, humor, and self-expression as key features that facilitate social interactions.
(2) Interactive response involving asking questions, agreeing, showing appreciation, or supporting others in ways that help form a personalized impression of the interlocutor.
(3) Cohesive response, which serves to maintain or build a sense of community or group commitment, reduce social distance, and enhance brand consensus.
These brand social media strategies in digital help increase the effectiveness of the brand’s digital customer engagement on social media. Consumer social media practices such as browsing, liking, sharing, commenting can be conceptualized as behavioral manifestations of digital customer brand engagement. Digital customer engagement is growing in importance as a source of brand value since it increases consumer loyalty and affects brand performance.
The effective use of brand social media strategies to improve digital customer engagement remains an ongoing challenge for enterprises. However, with strong brand strategy selection, design, and management based on social media. Great success can occur like in the case of Wendy’s.
Distinctive Brand Personality, Authenticity, and Long-Term Consistency
Wendy’s is a brand that is engaging digital customers successfully. The reason being is because of their approach to engagement with digital customers and their distinct brand voice. Wendy’s voice and brand are unique to them, but even IMC students can learn from their overall strategy and apply those lessons to their own social media accounts.
This article will explore the impact of brand social media strategies on digital customer engagement. This is extremely relevant to the practice of Integrated Marketing Communications and the incorporating practices of advertising, marketing, and public relations into an integrated plan. This article will also help provide a reference for the industry practitioner in his brand social media strategy selection, design, and management.
Here are four big things we can take away from Wendy’s social media accounts.
(1) They have a distinctive brand personality that includes constant zingers to users and competitors alike.
(2) They are extremely authentic. People can tell that their posts are written by an actual person and not some sort of automated curation tool. No computer could come up with the clever, highly entertaining posts that they share.
(3) They are consistent in the long term in their efforts to post often.
(4) Thanks to the immediacy and constant accessibility of the internet. Wendy’s social media team is extremely responsive to consumers interacting with their social media channels.
Nowadays the brand is the message the company wants to communicate to its consumers. So, the response strategies that Wendy’s is utilizing can be defined as “the communication process by which brands generate non-verbal and verbal cues in order to enhance intimacy with (potential) consumers.” People want responses to all their social media interactions with a particular brand, and they want them now. Wendy’s is ready!
Final Thoughts
When brands like Wendy’s reflect their interpersonal or social relationships and actively construct consumer brand relationships through social media. They can gain a competitive advantage against other similar brands. Also, companies with engaging social media branded content, an adoptive responsive approach to consumers, and research on digital customer engagement can do the same. Furthermore, these brands are noticing that creating content and building an online reputation with a particular target audience community is essential. Not only for the company but the brand image as well.
Wendy’s has a professional witty team supporting the brand, that we can mimic, and all adapt to the strategies they use. They’ve created and maintained a distinct voice that relies heavily on authenticity, and are now known for their exceptional responses, both customer service and otherwise. While most brands desire exchanges that lead the consumer to the purchase or consumption of their products or services. Wendy’s attempts to go beyond that and consistently show their customers that they care about what they want. So that an active relationship with the brand can develop into something that goes beyond the core transaction and turns into a longtime customer with a stable brand relationship to Wendy’s.
References
Anon, (2022). Nimble.com. https://www.nimble.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/1_g-cLxDjYRVjVjaWM54holA.jpeg
Gotter, A. (2017, April 11). What Wendy’s Twitter Account Can Teach Us about “Doing Social.” Agorapulse. https://www.agorapulse.com/blog/wendys-twitter-account/
Liu, Y., Liu, X., Wang, M., & Wen, D. (2021). How to Catch Customers’ Attention? A Study on the Effectiveness of Brand Social Media Strategies in Digital Customer Engagement. Frontiers in Psychology, 12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.800766
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