Business these days heavily depend on information flow. Employees are more productive when they can make better decisions and save time. This is possible when they have the much needed feedback about their product. Social network has recreated the bond between companies, employees, customers and suppliers, shortening the process from months to few hours. Social media is often best used by companies to fortify their brands, gain loyalty of their customers and to potentially augment their market share.
How to attain social media success in your business?
Walmart’s director gives five steps that your business should follow:
- Determine your value: Brands need to think about social media as a way to deliver value rather than as a tool. Rather than using social media for mere product gains, Walmart communicated about its sustainability efforts, hence delivering value, through its twitter accounts @WalmartGreen, @WalmartHealthy, @WalmartGiving and @WalmartAction, among others.
- Audience comes first. Know them well: Use marketing tools to understand people better, profile them and see what interests them, how committed and active are they with those interests.
- Deliver good content: We share content that we think people like and we find out whether or not they actually like it. Initially for few months, we launch community-based Twitter to advertise the product. Once we get valuable feedback we get to know if we are delivering good content. The popularity of the product among people itself will get us a larger audience rather than more promotion.
- Find clever metrics: It is easy for marketing department to evaluate the success of a social media campaign. But you need to get creative here. They have to track more positive metrics such as how often a post is retweeted or made favorite.
- Use your data well: We use the data collected to know our customers better. This will help in building a meaningful relationship with the customers.
There are many models that suit different businesses. Choose the one that best suits you wisely and follow it but be ready to be innovative because change is constant.
Social media generates many opportunities along with which it also gives rise to many challenges, the most likely being data security, privacy concerns and brand and reputation damage. So what could be the anticipated risks with these challenges? Security and privacy concerns could be: Identity theft, data retention, technical exploits like malware, viruses/worms, etc which leads to brand damage. How exactly a brand damage happens? This could be when you post hostile remarks or any classified information on a public site, calumniation, and violation of the rights secured by the copyright.
What about brand promotion?
Making consumers aware is the best way to promote your brand. New social networking sites are coming up every other day. Learn about the best ones to keep your consumer informed. You can promote your brand by being more effective. How exactly can that be done? One way is by interacting more with customers. Facebook is a social media to interact with customers. Like and comment on others pages. The more you do it, the more they will comment on yours. Reciprocation is the real secret to building social network which in turn helps you in promoting your brand. Facebook is one media. You could tweet about your products; use visual appeal via instagram and many more. Find the right media to do it. But be aware of the information shared on your pages. Make sure it does not hurt your brand. So try to incorporate privacy concerns.
So, how to handle these privacy concerns?
One possibility is to use closed social networks. This will inspire employees to work more openly; they support the need for privacy. Private messages could be targeted to specific audience and private groups can be created for defensive, on-going conversations. In this way, social network is open, with an option to have a private conversation as needed.
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/226753
http://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/Protecting_and_strengthening_your_brand_Social_media_governance_and_strategy/$FILE/Insights_on_IT_risk_Social_media.pdf
http://www.isaca.org/chapters2/kampala/newsandannouncements/Documents/Social_media_UTAMU_2.pdf
http://www.cio.com/article/735777/5_Secrets_to_Corporate_Social_Media_Success?page=2&taxonomyId=3004
http://sparkandhustle.com/takeaway-tips/using-social-media-to-promote-your-brand-grow-your-network-generate-revenue/
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-brand-promotion.htm
http://blog.bufferapp.com/10-surprising-social-media-statistics-that-will-make-you-rethink-your-strategy
You did a great job by being direct in telling what corporate readers should do to create a strong online brand by breaking the advice into five steps. Emphasizing data collection is particularly useful, whether through statistics or human feedback and is a big help in future marketing.
ReplyDeleteYour image for this post is also informative; I like numbers because it is less ambiguous and really gets the point across how people behave on social media sites.
You also mention closed social networks in your last paragraph. The one thing that I would have suggested is to elaborate more on closed social networks, since I am sure that many employees would find that type of information useful.
With that, good job.
This post is a reasonable survey of various social networks, opportunities and risks involving such networks. Perhaps you could have made it more interesting by adding an in-depth analysis of at least one aspect of social networking like security or promotion of brand loyalty, etc. Also when you cite an external source be succinct and provided a link to external source rather than copy-paste the big chunk. You have mentioned that there were several models of social networking for business but failed to enumerate them or provide a guidance on choose one among them. Such guidance would have made this post useful and interesting to the reader.
ReplyDelete