Going the Distance: Four Ways to Build a Better Customer Loyalty Program for Your Brand

It’s easy enough for a customer to join your loyalty program, especially when you’re offering an incentive such as discounts. All your customer has to do is give out some basic information, and voila! They’re in the fold, a brand new loyalty member with your company. From there, it’s happily ever after. You offer the perks; they stand solidly by you, bringing you their continued business. Simple. Or is it? In reality, just how many of those customers are act ively participating in your loyalty program? Do you know? Sure, loyalty program memberships are on the rise according to market research company eMarketer, having jumped 25 percent in the space of just two years. However, that figure may be a bit misleading. The truth is that, while loyalty program sign-ups may be more numerous, active participation in such programs is actually in decline. At the time of the study, the average US household had memberships in 29 loyalty programs; yet consumers were only active in 12 of those. That’s just 41 percent. And even that meager figure represents a drop of 2 percentage points per year over each of the preceding four years, according to a study by loyalty-marketing research company COLLOQUY.

When discounts just aren’t enough

So what’s a brand to do? How can you make your loyalty program worth your customer’s while—as well as your own? After all, gaining a new loyalty member doesn’t mean much if your customer isn’t actively participating in your program. Consider this: Does your customer loyalty program offer members anything different from what your competitors are offering? Chances are your program includes discounts. That’s a given. And what customer doesn’t appreciate a good discount? But when every other company out there is providing this staple benefit in comparable amounts, it becomes less and less likely that customers will remain loyal to any one particular brand. Frankly, it’s all too easy for customers to get lost in a sea of loyalty member discounts. They’re everywhere. In fact, just under half of internet users perceive that all rewards programs are alike, according to a 2015 eMarketer survey. The key to success, then, is to differentiate your business from the crowd. If you can offer your customers something unique and valuable beyond the usual discount, chances are they’ll be more likely to stick with your brand. Here’s some inspiration from companies who get it.

Virgin: Reward more purchases with more benefits.

That’s not to say you need to get rid of discounts entirely. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Customers still love a good discount. The goal is to be creative in terms of the loyalty perks you offer. Take the Virgin Atlantic Flying Club, for example. As part of its loyalty program, the airline allows members to earn miles and tier points. Members are inducted at the Club Red tier, from which they can move up to Club Silver and then Club Gold. Here, it’s not just a discount. It’s status. And people respond to feeling important, elite. Still, even where the rewards themselves are concerned, Virgin is motivating loyalty customers with some pretty attractive offers. At the Club Red tier, members earn flight miles and receive discounts on rental cars, airport parking, hotels and holiday flights. But as members rise in tiers, they get even more. At the Club Silver tier, members earn 50 percent more points on flights, access to expedited check-in, and priority standby seating. And once they reach the top, Club Gold members receive double miles, priority boarding and access to exclusive clubhouses where they can get a drink or a massage before their flight. Now that’s some serious incentive to keep coming back for more. Discounts are still part of the equation – but they are designed with innovation and personal value in mind, elevating them to more than just savings.

Amazon Prime: Pay upfront and become a VIP.

What if your customers only had to pay a one-time upfront fee to get a year’s worth of substantial benefits? It may not sound like the smartest business idea at first glance. But take a closer look. Amazon Prime users pay a nominal $99 a year to gain free, two-day shipping on millions of products with no minimum purchase. And that’s just one benefit of going Prime. It’s true that Amazon loses $1-2 billion a year on Prime. This comes as no surprise given the incredible value the program offers. But get this: Amazon makes up for its losses in markedly higher transaction frequency. Specifically, Prime members spend an average of $1,500 a year on Amazon.com, compared with $625 spent by non-Prime users, a ccording to a 2015 report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.

Patagonia: Cater to customer values.

Sometimes, the draw for consumers isn’t saving money or getting a great deal. The eco-friendly outdoor clothing company Patagonia figured this out back in 2011, when it partnered with eBay to launch its Common Threads Initiative: a program that allows customers to resell their used Patagonia clothing via the company’s website. Why is this program important to customers? And how does it benefit Patagonia? The company’s brand embraces environmental and social responsibility, so it was only fitting that they create a platform for essentially recycling old clothing rather than merely throwing it away. The Common Threads Initiative helps Patagonia build a memorable brand and fierce loyalty by offering its customers a cause that aligns with deep personal values. OK, so their customers get to make a little money, too. Everybody wins.

American Airlines: Gamify your loyalty program.

If you’re going to offer your customers a loyalty program, why not make it f un? After all, engagement is key to building a strong relationship with your customer. And what better way to achieve that goal than making a game of it. American Airlines had this very thing in mind when it created its AAdvantage Passport Challenge following its merger with USAirways. The goal: find a new way to engage customers as big changes were underway. Using a custom Facebook application, American Airlines created a virtual passport to increase brand awareness while offering members a chance to earn bonus points. Customers earned these rewards through a variety of game-like activities, from answering trivia questions to tracking travel through a personalized dashboard. In the end, participants earned more than 70 percent more stamps than expected – and the airline saw a ROI of more than 500 percent. The takeaway: people like games.

Stand out from the crowd.

Your approach to your customer loyalty program should align with your overall marketing approach. Effective branding is about standing out, not blending it. Being memorable is key. To this end, keep in mind that loyalty programs are no longer a novelty. That means that yesterday’s strategies won’t work moving forward, so look for ways to rise above the noise, setting yourself apart from the cloying drone of countless other cookie-cutter programs.

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Small Changes, Big Impact: 5 Things You Can (and Should!) Do Today to Boost Your Website’s Performance

Every spring it happens like clockwork: the temperatures get warmer, the days get longer and everything in nature becomes more vibrant and colorful. Along with these changes in the great outdoors comes the irresistible urge to clean house and embrace a fresh start. Why not keep that motivational momentum going and apply it to your business – and, more specifically, to your website – as well? After all, there’s no time like the present to sweep away the old and outdated and bring in fresh new ideas and technologies. But you don’t necessarily need to dive head-first into a full redesign and all of the time and expense that entails to reap measurable results. Instead, here are five small steps you can – and should! – take today to ensure that your site is up-to-date, relevant and doing all it can to bring you new customers and grow the community around your brand:

1. Reposition your contact form.

For most website owners – especially those in service-based businesses such as law, accounting, consulting, real estate, etc. – the key “win” for their site is when it motivates a visitor to request more information or schedule a meeting. Contact forms are a ubiquitous website staple intended to provide a convenient – and highly measurable – avenue to initiate communication between an interested prospect and a company. However, perhaps because they are so commonplace, all too often these forms are given little strategic thought, resulting in a cookie-cutter name/email address/phone number format that yields more bogus spam submissions than legitimate new business opportunities. However, there is one simple change you can make that has been shown to get better results: reposition your standard “Contact us” form as an “Ask our experts” feature. By doing so, you shift the focus of the form to providing your visitors with an opportunity to submit a question that is specific to their needs and concerns. Rather than feeling like they are opening themselves up to an endless barrage of solicitation calls and emails, your visitors will sense that they are initiating a dialogue with an expert who will help them solve their particular problem. Make sure to respond to all inquiries within 24 hours, provide helpful advice that is free of charge and tailored to your prospect’s situation, and leave the door open to continue the conversation in a future meeting or phone call. By doing so, you will establish an important foundation of trust and confidence with your potential new client that will make them more inclined to engage your professional services. I have personally seen the submission rates on these types of forms increase dramatically. On one site where this small change was implemented, form submissions jumped from one or two per week to one or two per day – all legitimate business opportunities that were sparked simply by repositioning the focus of the form.

2. Productize your offering.

Another challenge that professional services organizations face in creating a website that works as an effective customer conversion engine is that they do not sell a specific product but rather a suite of services that can be customized to each client’s specific needs. This makes it terribly hard to market to visitors who come to their site and simply want to know “What exactly does this company sell, and how much does it cost?”. Because there are so many variables to the company’s offerings, there is not a quick and easy answer to these questions. If this challenge sounds familiar to you, one approach you can try is to “productize” what you have to offer. Create a bundle of services with a fixed price, and market that package on your site in a simple, straightforward manner that makes your offering easy to understand and helps visitors feel like doing business with your company is as simple as buying a product off the shelf at a store. This is exactly what my company did with some of the technology consulting services that we offer. Instead of only listing the array of services we provide, we also created a product that representing a very specific offering. This made it so much easier to answer the “What do you sell?” question, and it gave us something tangible to promote in our marketing campaigns. In reality, this approach in no way limited the range of services we are able to offer our clients; rather, it merely served as a vehicle to open doors to new opportunities and made it easier to start conversations with new customers for whom we could ultimately provide a custom-tailored solution. Examine the services that you offer, and work with your marketing team to create an appealing package that you can market – understanding all the while that this “product” is really just a means for you to connect with customers and begin the sales process with something tangible that they can easily understand.

3. Lose your home page carousel.

One simple change that I have seen many websites make in the past year or so is to remove animated image carousels from their home pages. These carousels have long been a popular fixture of website design, but the reality is that they can sometimes do more harm than good. Home page carousels typically feature giant, screen-spanning images which carry with them heavy download requirements both for the images and for the scripts that power the animation sequences, thereby creating a potential stumbling block in performance for users on mobile devices or with slower connections. Additionally, studies have shown that click-through rates on animated carousels are extremely low, and they drop significantly from the first slide to the subsequent ones. This is why many companies are replacing rotating carousels with a singular static message instead. This one change can greatly reduce a page’s download size (when my company did this on our home page, its file size decreased by 75 percent) while having little to no effect on actual user engagement or click-through. In fact, because the page now loads more quickly, many sites actually see an uptick in user engagement because fewer people are abandoning a site due to poor performance. Do you have a carousel on your website? If so, do you know whether or not it is working well for you? Your marketing team may be able to do some A/B testing between a version of your site with this animation feature and one without it to see which performs better. Since carousels do work well for some sites (like news organizations or sites with lots of frequently updated content), having this data can help you determine whether or not it’s time to ditch the carousel.

4. Update your image(s).

Stock photography is something of a necessary evil of website design, as more often than not, companies don’t have the budget to execute a full-fledged custom professional photo shoot. However, not all stock images are created equal. Stock photos that are overused or that look so obviously staged that they scream of their “stockiness” can cheapen a site’s design and leave visitors with a negative overall impression of the site. Replacing those images can make a big difference in a site’s visual appeal. If your site’s imagery is stale, you can make some simple image swaps to freshen it up. If you are going to change out old stock images for new stock images, make sure to seek out photos that feel fresh and that are not terribly overused (most stock photo sites will tell you how many times an image has been downloaded). An even better option is to try to add some unique imagery to your site. This could be photographs that you hire a professional to take or – in keeping with one of this year’s hottest trends – custom illustrations that you commission from an artist. If your budget is tight, incorporating even just one or two such one-of-a-kind images in key spots on your site can really boost its visual impact. For instance, if you lose that aforementioned carousel on the home page and replace it with one truly compelling static image and message, it can make a really powerful first impression on your visitors.

5. Publish less.

Most experts agree that publishing original, value-add content on your site on a regular basis is key to optimizing its success – both from a sales and marketing standpoint and as an advantage in the never-ending battle of SEO. While I agree with this approach in principal, for many companies, the drive to publish regularly has resulted in putting out mediocre content simply to meet an inflexible standard of frequency. This is often an entirely counterproductive effort, as content that lacks in quality, original thought or value for the reader reflects poorly on the organization and its perceived level of expertise. Publishing original content to your site on a regular basis is still a best practice, but that content must offer value for it to succeed. Let’s say a visitor comes to your site and is impressed to find that you publish new articles weekly or monthly; however, once they click through the headline to see what they can glean from your writing, if what they find is mediocre at best, what motivation do they have to return to your site again in the future, let alone entrust you with their hard-earned dollars? If, on the other hand, you publish new content less frequently, but everything you produce is of the highest quality, then that same visitor will know that the time they spend on your site will always be worth their while, and they will look forward to the next time you post something new. Re-examine your current content marketing strategy, and ask yourself whether you are focused on quality or frequency. If it’s the latter, commit instead to writing less but to improving the quality of what you offer on your site. While this change may not have an immediate impact, it will absolutely yield long-term results that your visitors will appreciate and respond positively to.

In closing

Eventually, your website will need a redesign, but in the meantime you can make small, strategic, surgical changes that will pay immediate dividends in your site’s success. This approach of implementing gradual but regular modifications will also benefit you when it does come time for that full redesign. By making intelligent improvements over time, you will ultimately be closer to your end goal, leaving less to accomplish with the redesign and thereby paving the way for a smoother and less costly project.

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Mastering Tribe Marketing

Introduction

In part one of this series, Tribes in Today's Marketing, we established a foundational understanding of what tribes are, how and why they form, how they've evolved and how this has redefined the marketplace.

Now we turn our attention to how business growth is achieved today by identifying, understanding, joining and, in due time, leading the tribes that are relevant to your business and your bottom line.

Identify your tribe

When you are marketing your product or service, you strive to understand your target audience. Certainly you can map out the usual demographic variables – age, gender, income and location. These are easy to understand, but to participate and ascend to leadership in your tribe, you need more.

Chances are, your tribe doesn't exist around your direct offering in and of itself – either specifically around your brand or even your product or service in the generic sense.

More than likely, your tribe will coalesce around an idea or value that surrounds your product.

More than likely, your tribe will coalesce around an idea or value that surrounds your product – whether it's the convenience it provides or the aspect of a lifestyle that it affords.

If you sell golf clubs, the task of identifying your tribe is fairly straightforward. Your tribe is passionate about golf, about improving their game and about having the latest in golfing technology.

Perhaps you're an organic grocer. Your tribe is comprised of people who are conscientious about good health and nutrition and about supporting farmers who grow more natural, healthful foods. These are the people that are ready to take your message and set it on fire.

However, many times the tribes that drive organizations and their products operate at a different level.

If you own the corner coffee shop, you most certainly have something to offer the tribe of people who appreciate good coffee. But perhaps the atmosphere of your shop taps into the passions of a tribe that aspires to lead a cosmopolitan lifestyle. If you sell fair trade coffee, your products might appeal to an entirely different tribe – one that is sensitive to geopolitical issues.

Many times, tribes are about a state of mind. They are comprised of people who live a certain way and who care about certain things. In this way, the challenge is not so much about analyzing demographics but identifying those whose shared passions align with yours.

Locate your tribe

Tribes are never static. They exist with purpose. They are living life and solving problems. In order to continue being relevant to and meeting the needs of their members, they must evolve. This requires a platform – if not multiple platforms – where they can meet, discuss and debate ideas, share news and continue the ongoing conversation around their passions.

Tribes are never static. They exist with purpose.

They're on message boards; they're talking in forums; they're in the blogosphere; they're connecting with each other on Twitter. In some cases, they're even gathering and meeting in person.

Most of the time the communities that you are looking for are not centered in one place, and there's rarely an obvious sign that reads, “This community lives here.” If you sell coffee, you can't just go to coffeeisgreat.com and find people who are talking about how much they love coffee. However, if you've identified your tribe as well as their passions, needs, wants and fears, it's a lot easier to find them.

Interest-based tribes vs. relationship-based tribes

So far our focus has been primarily on interest-based tribes, which form when people connect around a shared passion. However, social media allows for a new type of connection and thus a new type of tribe – one that forms based on how its members know each other, whether through work, family or location.

These organically created tribes are not bound by any one common interest but rather by the shared goals and interests of life that are relevant to us all. We turn to these tribes for help getting things done, for solutions to everyday problems and for guidance to improve the quality of our lives and the lives of those around us.

Relationship-based tribes and local business

The power of these types of tribes is fairly significant when you consider the nearly limitless aspects of life that we all have in common. Most of us get haircuts, wear shoes, do laundry, watch TV, pay utility bills, buy groceries, own cars, improve our homes, raise children – the list goes on almost indefinitely.

For all of these things, we rely on our tribes of family, co-workers and neighbors for helpful advice and recommendations. As a result, small businesses have a tremendous opportunity to thrive within these tribes if they know where and how to find them. The answer is social media.

For example, if someone has a wonderful experience with a local mechanic, they don't log in to greatmechanics.com and evangelize for Mike the Mechanic. They do, however, tweet about the great service they received. They might even take this one step further and make Mike a member of their online community by connecting themselves with his business page on Facebook and sharing his website with friends living nearby.

In fact, it is not uncommon for the genesis of an interest-based tribe to start with relationship-based tribes talking about a brand and sharing its message.

In other words, if you connect with members of 50 family-based tribes, inevitably these people will connect to form their own community, and your message will begin to spread virally, feeding off of its own momentum to foster the growth of an interest-based tribe.

Become a member of the tribe

Membership doesn't begin the day you start participating in the conversation. You must earn the respect of the tribe in order to become one of them.

Don't come in and immediately start selling, or you'll be ousted swiftly and permanently. Better yet, don't even start by speaking. Listen first and gain insight into the culture within.

Most tribes have evolved over many years and have developed their own rules, perspectives and goals, and building credibility requires an appreciation of these nuances. Read through past conversations to understand the history and the passion surrounding the issues. Learn what's funny, what's serious, what's cliché, what's typical, what people want and what turns them off.

When you do start participating, the one and only rule that applies is to be real. Don't approach the conversation as a self-motivated, faceless corporate salesperson. Come to serve the tribe and its goals. Be yourself – a person with a budget, family, needs, problems and passions just like everyone else.

If you are in the business of doing what you love and you believe in what you do, then talk about it honestly when the time is right without bias or agenda. You must become a trusted member of the tribe before you can begin leading it.

Rule the tribe

The process and path to tribe leadership is unique for each community. However, all tribe leaders posses certain qualities that allow them to ascend to the top.

They are fearless. They are innovators. They challenge the status quo. But, above all, they have built a consistent reputation on standing for the tribe.

As time goes on, after you have proven that you are driven first and foremost by the advancement of the tribe, you'll gain footing as more than just another trusted, non-biased member. The tribe wants to know that you're listening and leading. They want to know that someone is there who genuinely cares about meeting their needs. If you can earn that level of trust with them, they will not only buy from you every time, they will spread your message like no marketing campaign ever could.

This is where tribe leadership truly runs contrary to business models rooted in decades of traditional marketing.

Today, it is more important to be trusted than to sell. Tribes are founded on trust, and trust cannot be achieved with the tactics of old marketing. It is true that tribe leadership and direct selling can both generate sales revenue – at least in the short term. However, while gaining the trust of your tribe is the more indirect path, in the end, the organization that makes a long-term investment in tribe leadership will ultimately achieve the greatest number of sales and claim ownership of the market.

In part three of this series, we'll cover how the influence of tribes extends beyond promotion and actually shapes how business itself evolves around the tribe.

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10 Steps to Conquering Twitter Through Trustcasting

A simplistic platform with complex rules

As a vehicle for communicating with customers, Twitter is a deceptively simple platform that, in reality, is a challenge to truly master. First, there’s the format. How do you develop meaningful relationships 140 characters at a time? There’s also the overwhelmingly expansive size of the community. With 200 million registered accounts in the Twitterverse, how do you attract followers that belong to your tribe and will help your business grow? Furthermore, there’s the staggering pace of the flow of information and dialogue. With an average of 110 million new tweets every day, how do you make a meaningful contribution? Each of these complex questions share the same answer: trustcasting. As we established in the Trust Manifesto, “In a marketplace founded by, built by and existing for the people, trust is the only fundamental currency.” The results you yield from your participation in the Twitterverse will only ever be as good as the time and effort you invest in earning trust and developing genuine relationships with others. If ever there were an ecosystem built by and existing for the people, it’s Twitter. Each user is the sole arbiter of who is and is not granted permission to be present in their feed. Each and every user is judge and jury of good and bad content; the interesting, relevant stuff gets elevated and passed along to their own networks while the boring, self-serving stuff withers and dies out quickly. The one and only way to break through is by engaging in an ongoing process of building and maintaining trust. Following the golden rule of trustcasting, everything must be centered around developing authentic and reciprocal relationships between your company and other members of the community – a process for which no shortcuts exist. The results you yield from your participation in the Twitterverse will only ever be as good as the time and effort you invest in earning trust and developing genuine relationships with others.

Here are 10 essential steps you must follow to conquer Twitter by adhering to the principles and practices of trustcasting:

1. Be one with the medium.

Before you dive in and make potentially embarrassing or even reputation-killing public blunders, observe the ways in which other more experienced users engage and interact with each other to get the lay of the land. Nothing screams “Imposter!” like someone who goes tearing through the Twitterverse like a bull in a china shop with no regard for the nuances of the community. By showing disregard for the unique language and customs of the Twitter ecosystem, you also show that you’re disinterested in serving anyone’s interests other than your own.

2. Step out from behind the corporate curtain.

While the old familiar rules of marketing would dictate that your handle should be your company name and your avatar should be your logo so that your brand is always front and center, Twitter isn’t a collection of brands on a shelf but a living, breathing community of people. If your customers encounter a faceless brand, they don’t know if the person behind the curtain is the great and powerful Oz or your summer intern. It’s much more natural for your followers to have an authentic conversation with a human being. Set up your profile with a photo of yourself and a bio that tells us more about you than your official job title while remaining transparent that you also represent a company. Make sure to let your personality to shine through and to allow your interactions display human qualities – whether it’s candor, humor, generosity or even humility. By allowing members of the community to get to know you on a personal level, you open the doors to a deeper level of engagement.

3. Find real people you can have real conversations with.

With so much buzz around the concept of influence on Twitter, it’s tempting to go chasing after the users with the highest follower counts and try to entice them into your circle, knowing that one retweet will reach thousands of potential customers. However, it’s more important to find members of your tribe – those whose interests and needs align with the products or services you offer – who will be receptive to what you have to say. A good way to find these people is to regularly search for users in your area who are talking about subjects relevant to your offering. For example, let’s say you’re a dog trainer. You could enter the search terms “puppy near:Charlotte within:20mi” to pinpoint users near you who might be interested in the tips, articles and offers you have to share. By following them or replying to their tweets when appropriate, you’ll increase the likelihood that they will follow you in return. As you build a friendly rapport with this group of core followers, others will take notice and want to join in the conversation. It will be as if you are at the head of the cool kids’ table, and they want to pull up a seat. Contrast that with a scenario in which you have amassed a list of supposedly influential users who ignore your content and never respond to you. Where did all the effort to win their follow leave you?

4. Give before you expect to receive.

The holy grail of Twitter is transforming your followers into evangelists who retweet your content through their networks and give it legs to travel far beyond your immediate circle of influence. However, you can’t expect the rewards if you don’t put in the work. It’s up to you to find or create interesting content that’s worthy of a share. Promotions and giveaways are easy fodder for sharing, but they’re not the only share-worthy material. A link to a thought-provoking article, an inspiring quotation or a helpful how-to video are also highly sharable. Even if the content isn’t originally yours, you’re doing a service to your community by finding good information and passing it along.

5. Put sales objective second to trust objectives.

Twitter is a medium, not a broadcast channel.You’ll only be successful if you approach it as a means to cultivate a tribe of people you’ll enjoy conversing with, learning from and sharing with rather than a tool to give you unlimited access to a captive audience that you can barrage with marketing messages at will. Don’t engage followers as a brand with an agenda to sell but as an ambassador for your brand with intentions of making a meaningful contribution. For example, let’s say you own a store that sells running gear. You should make it a regular practice to pass along links to local races, share articles from around the blogosphere about good running form and nutrition, offer helpful tips to users who tweet about their struggles staying motivated and give shout-outs to customers who have achieved personal milestones like completing their first 5k. Without ever posting a direct link to a product, you can allow prospective customers to reach their own conclusions that you are the kind of company they want to support when they’re ready to make a purchase.

6. Reach out.

Remember that Twitter is, in essence, one sprawling public forum. As a result, you don’t have to sit back and wait for someone to approach you. It’s perfectly acceptable to jump into the conversation, as long as you follow the rules of trustcasting in doing so. Don’t be disruptive, and don’t go straight for the kill with a hard sales pitch or a link to your website. If you see an opportunity to join in a dialogue with something insightful, helpful or even funny, go right ahead. You might get a response or a follow in return for your efforts. More importantly, over time, you’ll cultivate a reputation for being a trusted source of interesting, useful or entertaining information, and your company and your brand will reap the benefits of your perceived authority in these areas.

7. Be responsive.

Always be responsive if someone directs a question or comment your way. It’s smart to keep tabs on mentions of your name or the name of your company so that you can reply as quickly as possible. Attention spans on Twitter are short, and if hours pass before you respond, chances are good that the person has moved on, and you will have missed the window of opportunity for a good two-way dialogue. It’s also important to be an equal-opportunity responder. While it’s always fun to reply to someone who is raving about your product or service, it’s dangerous to ignore those who have complaints. Respond to your critics with sincere concern and express an earnest interest in making things right, just as you would a dissatisfied customer who was standing in front of you in your store. Even if your efforts are rebuffed or ignored, you will have done your best publicly to demonstrate that you have their best interests at heart. In trustcasting, respect for the customer is paramount.

8. Be the kind of follower you want to have.

One of the best ways to earn goodwill in the Twitterverse is to promote others’ content. When someone you’re following shares a link to a thought-provoking blog post, news article or video, retweet their content, giving them credit for their great find. Elevating other members of the community is a simple, selfless act that demonstrates that you’re there to do more than toot your own horn.

9. Let your guard down.

The best thing social media – Twitter included – has done for business is removing the barriers that once stood between companies and their customers. No longer are you bound by the restrictions of mass media channels; instead, you can interact directly with your customers on a personal level. Therefore, your participation on Twitter must follow the rules of the culture of the Web. If you insist on holding your followers at arm’s length and only allowing them to see a perfectly polished version of your company, you won’t get the most from your efforts. Instead, go with the flow and keep it real. Your tweets are essentially part of a long-running chat. Keep your tone light, casual and approachable. You can even give your followers the occasional behind-the-scenes glimpse into daily ins-and-outs of your business. If you own a bakery, and you tweet a photo of your chef hard at work making your signature dessert, it’s a great way to remind your followers that they can swing by and pick up a freshly baked, handmade treat without explicitly asking them to do so. And they’ll feel more invested in your success because they will feel more connected to the people behind the name.

10. Be patient and persistent.

You won’t be an overnight Twitter sensation. You may not ever play on the level of Martha Stewart or Ashton Kutcher. But you also don’t need millions – or even thousands – of followers to make your participation worth your while. At its core, Twitter is a high-tech version of traditional grassroots marketing. You must build your community one follower at a time. Keep your focus on the quality of your community and the depth of your interactions, both of which you must allow to grow naturally and organically. In trustcasting, there’s no substitute for honest intentions and hard work. But while earning and maintaining the trust of your followers is a more indirect path to business growth than conventional carpet-bombing sales and marketing tactics, it will ultimately allow you to achieve the greatest return in securing ownership of your market.

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