When you visit a business website for the first time, and you see a "follow us on Twitter" button, have you ever stopped to take notice of how it makes you feel? Do you actively search new sites for these social media engagement objects, such as Facebook or LinkedIn buttons? Do you have such buttons on your site? And if so, what was your reason for putting them there?
When I visit a site for the first time - especially if it is a business site from which I'm contemplating making a purchase - I know I look for the "follow me" buttons. And when I see these buttons, I click them. I want to know more about the company, to get familiar with it, before searching deeper into the site. I want to find out who their customers are, and what was their experience with this business. I want to know that there are real people back there, who actually care about me and my needs.
Seeing these types of buttons - especially the Twitter button - makes me feel a bit more comfortable with the business. I just recently noticed this. I noticed that I feel somehow "safer" doing business with a company that has a Twitter account with regular engagement. I think this is partly because Twitter fosters transparency and interaction. It's pretty hard to use only marketing-speak or company-slanted PR speak, on Twitter.
That is, of course, if you're actually engaging with your customers and followers on Twitter. I jst realized that this is the main thing I'm looking for when I visit the business' Twitter feed or Facebook page. I'm looking for whether the business actually talks to people, how it talks to people, and whether it reveals anything human (ie., non-corporate) to its people.
A business website doesn't facilitate much actual engagement with the visitor. You basically just go there, and it's a one-way communication from the company to you. But not so with a Twitter feed. On Twitter, the business tweets, but others on the perimeter respond. Observing this interaction can tell you a lot about a company. This, I think, is what fosters that feeling of comfortability when seeing the buttons on a website. The buttons remind you that there are real people behind the "persona" of a business website.
If these buttons really do have the power to invoke these emotions, it seems plain that there is huge branding value to social media sites. I would love to see more research done on such phenomena.
How do you feel when you see the "Follow Us on Twitter" button?
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