Social media is here to stay and has become a huge asset for companies to advertise themselves and build a relationship with existing and new customers.
The key part of marketing in social media networks is to determine the goal of the online venture. Of course, this will depend on the type of business. A mass consumer product company may want to increase brand awareness and loyalty, promote discounts, products, or simply stay in touch with customers and receive all the feedback as possible from them. For a service company, it becomes difficult to determine these goals. For a business-to-business firm, the real objective of using social media turns into a lot more complicated question to answer. Why? According to a study performed by White Horse, not really a lot of management-level individuals hop (or want to) on Facebook to check “what’s going on”. The marketer will then need to create appealing, interesting and catching content that customers will reward with attention and hopefully with feedback. The company will also need to understand the level of the tech-related requirements for the site to work correctly, and how literate the users need to be regarding this. For example, will it use Java or Flash applications? Which screen resolution is optimal for maximum site appearance?
It is also imperative to think of the level of control the customer will have in the site. I believe that most of the time, people sign in on customer service websites, forums and discussion communities to complain about a product, and try to convince others to not acquire it. The marketer must keep an attention to detail in the wording and content in the website, so it brings positive memories from visitors and engages them to make comments about it. My point is: satisfied customers seldom comment on websites or Tweet about it, so encourage them to!
As any good online marketing program, it is imperative to keep the target in quality content instead of quantity of users. People who regularly check and interact with your site is better than having hundreds of followers that never do anything in it.
An arising issue with Social Media is privacy. Generally people would say that companies can access your information if you follow their pages on Facebook. They can, if you don’t take care of the settings. Facebook offers plenty of privacy settings so you can specify who is able to see what in your profile. However, the blasting majority of users only have the default privacy settings. Therefore, a lot of the 500+ million Facebook users are open for marketers to check their profile. Nonetheless, even if people were careless about companies checking up on their profiles, marketers would need a lot of spare time to check them in a one-by-one basis, so I don’t think anybody should take so much concern on this.
Companies from medium to large-size with important marketing efforts also need to maintain a balance between offline and online strategies and take care of both at the same time. The content must be coherent between both worlds. This increases time and efforts, which turn into additional costs.
Finally, firms must understand the increasing power of social media these days. So hop on the train, or be left behind.
It is difficult to make a list of all the good things you can do with Social Media. I agree with you that it is not as simple as it might look. Companies must be more careful about the nature of the information that will be disclosed to the public and be prepared to handle the immediate reactions. Customers will always complain…they are born for that (but check in case they are actually right). As you said, the challenge is to make them say good things about our business. This site has good suggestion to get prepared for Social Media.
ReplyDeleteFirst I completely agree with your statement about developing relationships with individuals that interact within the companies’ profile or page mainly on everyday basis due to the dynamic updates that they can receive. Most of this type of media allows for a double sided communications between costumer and suppliers, positive feedback can be obtained from this and a company should pay careful attention to negative feedback, in order to be able to provide a fast response to it. For instance, a bad product, bad campaign or other product or service characteristic, may be quickly addressed if acknowledge early in the process, resulting in possible positive changes.
ReplyDeleteIn the other hand, you mention that service companies and B2B may have some difficult in using media as Facebook. I believe that all companies, independently of their size and their offered product or service, have to take advantage of ALL resources to try to become more efficient and develop relationships with stakeholders. Recently, Facebook developed a new service with internal “messaging” that may be used to increase B2B participation.
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/11/how_facebook_messages_will.html
Eventually needs and innovation will develop newer and cost effective methods to use social media in greater proportion than they are used today in specific B2B applications. I’m sure somebody out there is thinking of a new way to do it right now, and if it not……. I hope somebody read this and start working on it, there could be some money on it!!!!
It is very clear that social media has a lot of positives as well as a few negatives, and most importantly it is necessary for us to comprehend that this tool is crucial in the future growth of a business, be it small or large. Companies in my opinion, need to take full advantage of all the tools that are now at their disposal in order to increase their market presence and thus increase their customer base and their bottom line. They must also, however, manage these tools in order to make sure that they positively reflect their business, and make sure not to tarnish their image by portraying themselves in a negative light through the different types of social media.
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