Can use of social media improve business results?
Is the time spent on social media, time well spent?
Are we jumping on the band wagon without a clear goal in mind?
Every company starting out in the “social-media-sphere” should ask these questions before making any significant investment, to avoid waste of valuable marketing dollars and efforts.
Here is a list of top five key areas where companies can leverage social media to improve business results.
- Customer advocacy and retention: Social media platforms can bring businesses closer to consumers. Facebook pages, blogs and twitter profiles help companies engage in conversations with people. Effective management of these platforms can result in increased referrals, customer retention and build brand awareness and loyalty.
- Customer issue resolution: Disciplined monitoring of online communities can be a very effective in responding to customer issues. It is impossible to stop people from having a conversation about your brand- whether positive or otherwise. But giving them a forum to voice their opinion will speed up your response and resolution process.
- Market and consumer research: Once a company has established a credible presence in social media with a loyal following of fans, friends or followers, it can leverage the online community to gain valuable consumer insights and emerging trends.
- Website traffic: Broadcasting relevant information through Twitter, Facebook and blogs can bring visitors to your site. It’s an opportunity to reach new audience. If the content is valuable, it may even get link backs and referrals from other sites.
- SEO ranking: Creating search engine optimised content and leveraging it through social media can hugely improve a website’s organic search ranking. It attracts new participants via search. But it requites a tactical mix of social bookmaking sites like digg.com and delicious along with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
The key is to understand how social media fits into your overall business strategy and value proposition. From this you can then determine what are the key measures to determine success. Often we focus on the outcome measures such as sales and yet the lead indicators are critical.
Let’s have a conversation. Post your thoughts about leveraging social media to improve business results.
Jacki Johnson
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