Social media is people connecting with others
Social media allows each person to connect with others, which means most of the messaging a person receives is from his or her network. It’s essential for companies to learn to network with its customers in order to promote the company message.
Social media is forming relationships for personal, political, and business use
Social media is not just about content or messaging in a different format. Social media is about relationships. For companies, social media is about creating a more personal relationship with end-consumers to build a network around a service or product. It is clear that there are many components to social media, but the best way to understand social media is to just try it. Are you excited to see what social media can do for your business? You should be!
Perfecting a social media strategy
Even though a social media strategy is important, don’t wait for the strategy to set up your company’s social media account. Reserving your company’s name on various social media sites is of the utmost importance. Furthermore, because it takes time to build social media accounts, every minute you waste by not being there is followers you could be losing.
Gathering followers rather than building a network
There are no shortcuts in social media, and the bottom line is companies have to build relationships with their customers before they can sell anything. Social media may seem free, but the hidden time costs to build relationships.
The Different Ways Some Companies Use Social Media
Using social media to reach end-consumers
There are so many ways to use social media to communicate with the customer, and as social media goes mainstream companies are finding new ways every day. All of these purposes for communication fall into three main functions: public relations and marketing, sales, and customer services.
Social Media Marketing
Before your company goes any further with social media, it’s important to decide what the goal is. Your company may want to use social media for one, two, or all three of these purposes, and the strategies and tactics for each purpose are different.
The framework for developing a social media strategy consists of three potential functions: public relations and marketing, sales, and customer services.
These three functions feed each other in a cycle, and companies can create a fairly comprehensive social media strategy by taking each into consideration.
Viral Marketing
Most companies have heard of the benefits of viral marketing using social media, but few understand how to execute a viral marketing campaign. First, let‟s answer the question: What is a viral marketing campaign? There’s a common misconception that viral marketing messages must have millions of page views or attract hundreds of thousands of followers in a short period of time in order to be successful. Unfortunately, very few small to mid-sized companies will ever see this type of success because its market is too small or its products are focused on a niche. Viral marketing campaigns are simply compelling messages that exploit common behaviors and utilize existing networks, that can be transferred effortlessly from person to person on a large scale. The measures of success of a viral marketing campaign must take into account the competitors, resources, and niche of the company.
Sales
Social media is a wonderful method for driving sales for your company. Using social media as part of your company’s sales process is similar to any other method you might use. Use social media to generate prospects, and then capture prospects as leads.
Find prospects
In social media, generating prospects usually means driving traffic to a website where you can collect lead information. Naturally, finding prospects for your sales pipeline will be much easier the more you’ve connected with your audience on each of platforms, in the form of subscribers, followers, fans, and friends. Once you have an audience on several different social media platforms, here your company can drive traffic to a website.
Customer Services
Building relationships with current customers is one of the most important things any company can do, but it‟s also one of the most neglected. Social media offers a solution to providing faster customer service to customers so companies can maintain their relationships and ensure repeat purchases.