Want to reach the mass affluent and compel them to action with your marketing? Of course you do—who wouldn’t?  LinkedIn recently released a study in partnership with Cogent Research on using social media to influence the mass affluent. Here are the important highlights of the study and how you can start implementing them in your business.

First, know that social media has reached near-complete saturation (87%) among the mass affluent. Not only that, but 1 in 2 use social for professional purposes, with LinkedIn being the big winner for professional social media usage. Clearly, social media is not something that can be ignored any longer—it’s the place to be for marketers today.

According to the LinkedIn/Cogent study, the three most important things that mass affluent want from brand presences on social media are 1, improved customer service, 2, timely updates, and 3, relevant content.

As I tell the graduate students I teach, to offer any of these three things on social media, you need to listening to your audience, and then speak your customers’ language. I can’t overstate this enough—listening to your customers and speaking their language is absolutely essential for successful social media marketing.

Once you start listening, then you’ll be a great position to offer great customer service to your audience on social media—after all, customer service is really all about listening to someone’s problem and then trying to fix it.

Timely updates are important on social media because most social platforms are stream-based (e.g. Facebook’s Newsfeed) and if you’re not in the stream, then you are invisible. Most people do not go to brand pages on social media very often—they might go to them once to like the page, but after that, they expect the brand to come to them by posting regular content that shows up in their newsfeeds.

As for relevant content, this is where content marketers excel. Given that at least 1 in 5 mass affluent consider relevant content the most valuable element of a brand’s social presence, this area is quite important. Whether it is through telling a compelling story or offering free ebooks, this third area is the content marketer’s place to shine.

Now that we have social media, reaching the mass affluent has never been easier! Build relationships with the mass affluent by meeting their needs on social media and you can let them bring their money to you.