September 19, 2023
If you want to find out some information, where do you look as a consumer?
In days gone by, you’d find a book, but now it’s a quick Google search or a hop onto your preferred social media.
Platforms like Reddit, Twitter/X or Facebook pages can sometimes have already made groups, communities and posts written by strangers on the internet who are able to answer your query. Or even TikTok – now used as a search engine by Gen-Z – where you can quickly type your question or the topic you want more information on, and will be directed to thousands of user-generated content related to that subject.
BUT, how reliable is it? After all, it’s content shared by a stranger on the internet. So how can you be sure it’s not misinformation?
FAKE NEWS
Unsurprisingly, recent social listening on GWI suggests that a big pain point for consumers is a lack of reliable information. So, they look to relevant brands to provide them with that credibility and trust them to give it.
This is a key opportunity for brands to fill the space of misinformation and fake news, by providing the truth, ranging from serious health data that could affect hundreds of thousands of people (e.g. those bleach comments made by a certain someone). All the way to news about an event that wasn’t entirely correct or a comment an influencer made about something related to the brand.
However, if a brand is sharing information in the content they post on social (or just the internet for that matter) they have a level of responsibility to ensure that what they’re saying is correct and factual or is clear that it’s just their opinion about something. That’s why it’s so important for the team in charge of content at the brand, to do the research before publishing.
Reliable, Credible, Trustworthy
Find a brand out there that doesn’t want to be associated with the words reliable, credible or trustworthy. I’ll wait.
By consistently providing accurate information, and answering the pain points of questions of the audience, a brand is able to keep building its credibility. Sometimes this consistency allows them to become the go-to or an authority on their relevant subject.
It doesn’t just have to be brands that have ‘inform’ or ‘educate’ as one of their key pillars. Instead, it could be a brand like ASOS, where a consumer would visit their IG to find the latest trends in high-street fashion (granted, the content ASOS posts out doesn’t necessarily need to be fact-checked as they’re the trend-setters) as they’re known as a credible, go-to source.