What you’ll learn to do: Use various types of social media to build affinity with your customers and make your brand stand out

Social media can also be used to cultivate deeper brand and customer loyalty. In this sense, customers can, in a way, become part of the very organizations and companies that sell them goods and services. This is a relatively new phenomenon in market capitalism—it requires deeper study to understand it more fully—but for our purposes here, we hone in on three examples of community and deeper integration of customers into your organization.

Even for this new kind of engagement, we can stay within the social media framework introduced at the beginning of the module:

1. To bring services or products to market; that is, increase awareness.
2. To engage customers; often with respect to service issues or problems.
3. To encourage a “buzz” or interest around a company, its product(s) or service(s).