The Three C’s to Creating Trust — #3: Be Conversational
This is the final post in our series about Trust. If you haven’t already, we would recommend you reading the other posts about building trust, being consistent and being creative to help build your overall trust in your brand or company.
Almost anyone would agree that in order to be conversational, you have to be able to start conversations. I know I’m not providing any earth-shattering details here, but there are definitely two ways you can start conversations online.
Probably the easiest way to start a conversation is to directly do it. Online, this can be just as easy as creating a tweet or a Facebook post. The more difficult way to start a conversation, and consequently is more valuable to your business, is to build off the ideas mentioned in our previous post about creativity and produce something that your audience will share without being asked. This will typically happen when the content you produce provides some value to your audience such as answering a question or providing an incentive such as a discount on one of your products. When your audience starts to share this information with others online through their social networks or other blog articles and posts; search engines become aware of the traffic that this creates and also feels compelled to share your content with others – in other words you will begin to climb in the search result pages!
As great as starting a conversation is to building trust, what follows is even more powerful for strengthening those bonds. That is the act of continuing the conversation and making sure that you are a part of it. Actively engaging with your audience helps them build their trust in your business. It also tells search engines you will take care of the clients they send to your office in both your interactions online and off. These are the types of businesses search engines like to promote in their search results. Bottom line is that if there is a conversation happening out there about your brand, you should be a part of it!
And the other great thing about these conversations is that they make it really easy to start other conversations. The whole idea that questions leads to more questions are prevalent here, which is a good thing. Continuing to answer questions from your audience will keep them engaged and help create that relationship based on trust.

