Reciprocity
Reciprocity could greatly benefit the various principles of engagement through which you will interact with your target audience. One of the core areas that it will benefit is your ability to relate and build relationships with your audience. Let us explore how you can make it work for you.
Creating Awareness
At the start of your networking journey, your ideal customer or future network partners might not be aware of who you are. By using the principle of reciprocity, you will create a goodwill account with these individuals that you will be able to draw on when you start sharing posts. How this works in practice is that by liking or sharing social media posts from your customer, your customer will see who you are and will reciprocate in the future by liking or sharing your posts. Have a look at the below video to see more about the science of reciprocity.
You can increase the likelihood of receiving attention from the target audience whom you have chosen to engage with by making comments about that person’s post. Be wary however to not do so by self-promoting at the same time or you might end up causing more harm than good. At the start of your journey, you might however want to simply like posts that are in line with what it is that you want to build awareness about.
Make sure that you are clear on the cause or niche or industry that you are in when you are sharing or commenting on someone else’s posts. Veering too much off your centre of relevance could cause others to view you as a generalist rather than a thought leader or a specialist.
Once you start sharing posts of your own those people who you become aware of you will have a stronger commitment towards sharing, commenting, or liking your articles. If these individuals are end users in large organisations, then it will further create a perception that your posts have value to this industry.