What is social media and why do your company need it?
Social media was, previously, a tool exclusively made for people to interact with their friends and family. But with the current evolving society, it has now become a must-have tool for the businesses and organizations as well. Social media plays a key role in marketing your companies’ skills and niche to the general public. With the advent of sites like Twitter and Facebook, which has population of over one billion, social media takes a holistic approach for the organization.
Let’s look why your company need this powerful media which is considered to be biggest revolution after industrial revolution.
Building a Community
With the help of the social media, your company can build its own virtual community like on Facebook. It can bring your customers and potential stakeholders to engage and take part in your business as well as your company. Creating a buzz about your work, would do great wonders for the demand of your product. It will also give the consumer base a platform to voice out their opinions as well their reservations. However, here the company has to be very smart as to which complaint they should pay heed to and which one to ignore. To exist in such a dynamic space where everyone is your potential customer and there are no two ends, social media presents a tremendous dormant opportunities for you to target.
Creating Strong Relationships
Creating relationships is yet another aspect of social media. As the interaction becomes more and more common between an average buyer and the seller, a sense of loyalty is embossed in the customer. Giving special attention to these customers will not only make them loyal but they will defend your product in any arena. The stage of defending is the last level of customer relationship. Through social media and special care and attention, customers might be amazed at the quality of services the company provides. Customers then, will not only be loyal to your business but also advocate them to their peers. Moreover, they will also defend your business in the time of need.
Better Customer Service
Social media is not just about marketing your product and creating a customer base. With the use of search traffic data and on-site engagements, the companies can create content which suit the present consumers, not to mention giving them a chance to voice out their questions to the management. It may seem a campaign against your company at first, but this is actually a great excuse for the management to reach out to the customers and give them special attention. Some customers even use Snapchat. Companies will use social media to reach out to the disturbed customers and fix their problems on one-to-one basis. When the companies show in the virtual community their openness and willingness to help their customers, more and more customers will be satisfied knowing that the company has a customer prioritized policy rather than a product strategy.
Product Development
With the incoming feedbacks, social media also assists the companies to develop their product lines according to the requirements of the customers. The online discussions and social listening efforts will signal the company as to what their customers expect from the company. Yet, the company has to wise enough to know that most customers don’t know what they exactly want. So with the mixture of customer feedback and company strategies, social media provides the service of product development. With the ease of availability of information on various websites like Facebook, through social media one can also keep a track of their competition. Not only social media helps you with competitors, but also tells you the weaknesses of the competitors. This is why the companies should rush to rectify any error made, because one dissatisfied customer might mean losing ten more customers. Another element which the social media offers is the tester communities. The company could build these communities to test their products. Such communities are awfully helpful in providing keen insight to the performance and quality of the product.
Human Resource Management
Aside from the product and customer domain of the company, social media also caters to the human resource domain. While encouraging employee involvement, it also helps in finding recruits and helping retain them. Employees are the building blocks of any company and social media understands its significance. Social media is the ideal place to recruit new employees like Yammer and Chatter. Online job search is widely popular due to technological advancements in the job market. Through the social media, the HR management will also be able to keep a record of the interested employees and the traffic on the page which will inform them of the kind of people interested in the business. Not only the people, social media provides an option to let the businesses know of the qualifications, skills and expertise which are widely prevalent in the market so they might pick and choose.
Cheaper Source
Social media should not be utilized by one or two departments of the company, but rather should be used to furnish the needs and requirements of all the faucets of the company. Social media is for the whole organization to derive benefit from. It is efficient, cheap and easy to use. Efficiency can be measured by the use of cheaper resources to get your message across to a wider market and the value created from it. People are more receptive towards social media rather than TV commercials or posters. It is also cheaper to use as compared to costly 1 minute adverts on the television or even the radio. Not to mention the limited and segmented viewers which the television channels offer.
Therefore, social media is a crucial weapon for today’s companies to have. Not only will it tell the customers of your ongoing projects and events, it will also facilitate your internal operations of the company such as human resource and product development strategy making. With considerable time and effort, the companies can derive immense profits from social media. With the right software or website, all the management will need it a laptop and an internet connection to take the world by a storm! So if you don’t want to be left behind in the race, you should make use of the social media.
