Businesses are starting to get it. They once saw social media as a channel like many others through which they could broadcast their message. When that didn’t work, they shifted to using it as a branding tool only. When that wasn’t effective, they started communicating with people. Bingo! Now, more need to take it to the next level.

We see it all the time on some social media pages. Businesses are posting things to Facebook like pictures of happy customers. They’re answering questions and highlighting things happening at their business. The next step is to be thankful.

Social media in general and Facebook in particular is a perfect place to humanize the business. One of the best things a business can do to humanize itself is to be thankful. There are many things that businesses today can focus on through social media, to highlight as a positive thing. It’s customers. It’s good things that happen to the business, the local community, and the people in it. It’s testimonials and reviews.

The key is to make it social. Making it social takes a little work. It’s not about sharing a link to a review, for example, on Facebook. It’s about expressing true gratitude for the review and personalizing it in a way that makes it stand out.

People are much more appreciative of the effort it takes to highlight a personalized response to a review than they are about a review that was a simple click of a button on a link. More importantly, highlighting reviews in this way is much more visible on news feeds. Many of the review sites have been so blasted out onto Facebook and other social media sites that they’re not even eligible for promotion through Facebook ads.

Social media is about reaching people and allowing people to reach you in return. Being thankful, humble, and appreciative of the good things around you and your business is an effective way of amplifying the reach abilities from both directions – you reaching them and them reaching you. It’s what makes social media so important.