What Can Social Media Do For Your Business?
A friend of mine asked me what social media could do for her business, so I thought I would put together a list of five topics that I thought would be useful for business owners to know about.
1. FIND AND ACTIVATE YOUR BRAND AMBASSADORS
Social media can help you identify and engage your brand ambassadors. These are folks who are passionate about your brand and are not shy to talk about it using social media. Consider engaging them in your new product development, provide them with a window into your company’s culture and continuously supply them with information so that they may continue talking about your brand.
2. FIND AND HELP THOSE HAVING PROBLEMS W/ YOUR BRAND
Similarly to using Social Media to find your brand ambassadors, you’ll find many of your existing customers who are having issues with your products or your customer service and who are not afraid to use social media channels to let their voice be heard. I see that all the time on Twitter and by monitoring my company’s branded keywords on Technorati or through Google alerts. You can choose to ignore these folks or you can jump in to help. Your participation in social media gives you a unique opportunity to reach out to these customers through channels they might not expect to receive customer service through. Comcast has done it through @comcastcares on Twitter and many other brands are following in their footsteps.
3. TAKE ADVANTAGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA CONVERSATIONS THROUGH SYSTEMATIC MONITORING
Have you started monitoring social media for your branded keywords? How about your competitor’s keywords? Add to it your branded product names, industries you play in and verticals you are venturing into. Social media gives you an incredible opportunity to listen in on conversations from your current customers and prospects (including your competitors’) who openly discuss their needs, generate new product ideas and alert you of issues with your existing products.
4. PRACTICE CONVERSATIONAL MARKETING
Social media is not about constantly pushing the same marketing message through every available channel and hoping that 0.2 percent of your recipients will actually pay attention to your ad. That’s traditional advertising. What you are hoping for is to energize social media participants through conversational marketing. How? For starters consider using social media to amplify your company’s philanthropic activities. Set up social media channels with content about your initiative and make it easy for others to virally spread it to others. I did not understand the power of social media viral spread until we used for the Firefighter Calendar Judging Event my company was sponsoring. Social media outreach took the campaign to the next level and created a powerful word-of-mouth marketing mechanism.
5. TAKE ADVANTAGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN YOUR WORKPLACE
Finally, don’t forget that social media is not limited to your customers and external stakeholders. Through Enterprise 2.0 tools including wikis, blogs, instant messaging, internal social networks and microblogging apps, social media can help improve your employee communications and help them collaborate with one another regardless of office location, business unit association or positioning on the corporate ladder.
