Social Media in Business

1. Social Media in Business by Brad Fettig

2. Introduction • The use of social media is growing at an astronomical rate. With Facebook floating on the stock exchange at a mind boggling $104 billion. • However, there is no denying the power of social media and the impact that it can have on the business of marketing.

3. Tactics • Social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Pinterest represent a huge opportunity for businesses to grab the attention of customers while simultaneously building a brand image. • There are many tactics that businesses employ to do this, like the creation of brand profiles on social networks such as Facebook fan pages and branded podcasts and apps.

4. Word of Mouth • Social media platforms provide the perfect opportunity to take advantage of word of mouth and to see it spread. • People are connected on a global scale and casually participate in each others lives through online observation. Something as simple as “Liking” a brand on Facebook can spread virally very quickly throughout the various social media channels providing rapid exposure of products.

5. …Word of Mouth • Since individuals trust the opinions of their peers far more than advertisements, millions of people review products and services directly via social media sites, using video through Youtube, which in many cases is shared to other social media websites. • As a consequence, the public increasingly look to social media to find reviews on various products and services to help them to make buying decisions. • Companies even provide products to popular Youtube users to review for their subscribers as well as create their own branded Youtube channels.

6. Communicating with Customers • Companies may see the spread of negative reviews about their products or services as a bad thing, when they can use it to their advantage. • By utilizing social media effectively, companies can reach out to dissatisfied customers directly, within their own social media environment, to find innovative ways of improving the product or service they have on offer.

7. Influence • When creating a social media marketing strategy, it is worth thinking very carefully about who is being targeted. • There will be people within your social networks who may not necessarily be customers, but who nevertheless can have a massive impact on your marketing efforts.

8. …Influence • Forrester Analyst Augie Ray broke the various types of social media influencers into three distinct categories: • Social Broadcasters (at the top) • Mass Influencers (middle) • Potential Influencers (bottom of the pyramid) • More than 80% of that population is made up of “potential influencers”. • It is worth making the effort to identify who these people are in your network and connect with them to attract shares and likes which ultimately help to spread your brand name.

9. Considerations • Social media has had, and is continuing to have a huge influence on business, marketing and on how businesses engage with their target market. • The use of social media to share and engage with others continues to grow at an astounding rate, so it would be wise for any business to develop and implement a sustainable social media strategy in order to successfully take advantage of this rapidly changing environment.

10. Social media is an easy way to learn about your audience • For businesses in any industry, the key to success is knowing your audience. • Social media makes this possible, and easier to accomplish than ever. With tools like Facebook, you can learn the dominant languages spoken among your social media audience, as well as their age and gender. • This knowledge can help you cater campaigns and product offers to your target audience, which will provide you a better return on investment.

11. Social media helps target audiences more effectively • Geo-targeting is an effective way to send your message out to a specific audience or demographic based on their location. • Social networks like Facebook and Twitter have tools that allow you to communicate the right kind of content to your audience. • For example, in Hootsuite you can target by ‘Location’, ‘Language’, ‘Age’, ‘Gender’, ‘Relationship status’, ‘Interested in’, and ‘Education’ on Facebook, and ‘Country(s)’ on Twitter. • For example, if you want to send out a post to people who speak Spanish, geo-targeting is an easy and effective way to do it.

12. Social media helps find new customers and expand your audience • Social networks like Twitter allow small businesses to locate their current customers or seek out potential customers. • For example, if you open a new coffee shop in the neighborhood, you can create a geo search in Hootsuite to locate anyone tweeting about needing a morning cup of coffeewithin your area. • After locating those tweeting about coffee, you can start reaching out to them, and invite them to come and try your products in your shop.

13. Social media allows you to receive instant feedback from your customers’ perspective • Social media for business gives you instant access to positive or negative feedback, which provides you with valuable insights on the customer perspective. • For example, if you launch a new product and share it on social media, you’ll instantly learn what your customers think of it. • Another way to gain customer perspective with social media is by learning how they use your product; brands often base new products or services on their customers’ original ideas.

14. Improve market intelligence and get ahead of your competitors with social media • With social media monitoring you can gain key information on your competitors, therefore improving your market intelligence. • This kind of intel will allow you to make strategic business decisions in order to stay ahead of your competition. • For example, you can create search streams in Hootsuite to monitor mentions of your competitor’s name or product. Based on your search results, you can improve your business to offer something your competitors are missing.

15. Social media can help increase website traffic and search ranking • So you built a website for your company, now what? • One of the best benefits of social media for business is using it to increase your website traffic. • Not only does social media help you direct people to your website, but the more social media shares you receive, the higher your search ranking will be.

16. Share content easier and faster with social media • In the past, marketers faced the challenge of ensuring their content reaches their customers in the shortest possible time. With the help of social media, sharing content got easier and faster. • When you use social media for business, specifically for sharing content about your business or for content curation, all you need to do is simply share it on your brand’s social network accounts. • But keep in mind that getting your customers to share your content with their followers means you need to make sure your social media content aligns to your brand and interests your audience.

17. Social media helps generate leads for one third of the cost • Social media is an easy way to generate leads. • For example, Twitter ads has allows a company to scale, increase reach, and fuel demand generation. • ungated content - free content requiring no email address for access. • gated content - free content requiring an email. • Sharing gated content on social media is a great way for any company to generate leads.

18. Create meaningful relationships with customers through social media • Social media is great for creating meaningful relationships with your customers. • For example, social media allows tourism brands to create dialogue with travelers, therefore creating relationships with customers before, during, and after they have booked a trip with the company. • This kind of social media dialogue between brands and customers is something traditional advertising will never achieve.

19. Social media lets you increase brand awareness and reach with little to no budget • The costs associated with advertising strategies are a lot higher with traditional methods. • Recently, marketing departments across companies started hiring community managers to increase brand awareness and reach through social media. These community managers foster relationships with online audiences in different regions. • This helps to make sure a company can keep expanding the reach of the brand to those regions and maintain relationships with key stakeholders.

20. Disadvantages

21. Disadvantages of Social media • Marketers are faced with an array of new choices with the rapid increase in the use of social media. • The main disadvantage of using social networks as marketing tools is the time required to navigate and manage the intricacies of each medium. • Social media networks come in different forms and settings and each requires its own distinctive approach to engagement and individualization.

22. Social Networking is Time Intensive • As the name implies, social media is interactive, and successful, two-way exchanges take commitment. • The nature of marketing changes in social networks, with the focus placed on establishing long-term relationships that can turn into more sales. • Somebody has to be responsible to monitor each network, respond to comments, answer questions and post product information the customer deems valuable. • Businesses without a service to manage these social networks will find it difficult to compete.

23. Social Marketing Seen as Intrusive • Some avid social network members feel that marketing and advertising is intrusive to their privacy. • Many users feel uneasy about sharing personal information and place social networks low in security confidence. • The practice of shaping ads and campaigns off member information collected from social networking sites has stirred a wave confidentiality controversy, and marketing efforts can be met with bitterness and offensive reactions.

24. Lack of Feedback Control • One aspect of social networking that is especially damaging to marketing campaigns is negative post responses. • Unhappy customers or industry competitors are able to post disparaging or offensive pictures, posts or videos and there is not much a marketer can do to prevent these occurrences. • Still, negative or other non-constructive feedback cannot be ignored. • Social networks must be managed efficiently enough to immediately respond and neutralize harmful posts.

25. Local Businesses and Distant Fans • Most social networks are free to join and operate, but without paid advertising to firmly target their customer base, local businesses often end up with followers who are not local. • The best use of marketing through social networking sites is to collect information from customers regarding their interests and motivations for repeat business. • Social marketing can fall flat when customers and clients are not around to frequent local businesses and accurately provide data through using the service. • To some extent, e-commerce options can optimize this disadvantage by offering online products or services.

26. Mainly Attracts Current Brand Users • Another potential downside to social network marketing is that it easily attracts current loyal customers, but much more effort is required to attain new business. • Of course, this is excellent to rouse existing patrons into making repeated purchases. • Current patrons can influence new consumers to try services and products. The marketing balancing act is to avoid pure advertising that social consumers detest and create relationship bonds.

27. Bad Branding • The wrong online brand strategy can doom a company, and put you at a huge viral social disadvantage. • Just ask Sony. • Sony had a great platform in the PS3 but they chose to neglect the value of effective social media and as a result the sales of the Microsoft Xbox soared while Sony’s always remained number two.

28. Commitment • If your company decided to start a blog, twitter feed, or Facebook page, then designate someone to maintain it. • There is nothing worse than going to visit a corporate blog in September and the last post was in June. It tells potential customers that if you are too busy to maintain your blog then you are probably too busy to provide them with customer support.

29. Relevant content • Blogs and Twitter feeds tend to take on the persona of their authors and this is a bad, bad thing! • It is not an individual’s feed or blog, it belongs to the company and they have designated you as the representative to post. • Many Social media marketers forget this and think that they are the blog or feed. This will only end in a bad way. • Corporate blogs and feeds should be agnostic. They need to be interesting and represent the company, but they should be designed that authors can be swapped out with a limited drop in following. • Social Media is a marketing tool that needs serious content. No one cares that you are in Switzerland for a conference and seeing the local sites. • Keep it relevant.

30. Time • Getting involved with Social Media is very time consuming. • A company may need to designate an individual to constantly feed their pages and profile with relevant content. This individual also has to monitor comments and respond to questions.

31. …Time • For small companies this can be a serious problem as they need all hands on deck to keep the company afloat. • The commitment of time is why many small companies choose not to engage in social media to boost their marketing efforts. • They realize their limitations and simply do without. This is where an outside consultant becomes invaluable.

32. No short term ROI • Social Media Marketing is a long term strategy. • Seeing a return could take anywhere from a few months to a year before a company sees the benefits of increased customer loyalty and sales.

33. The risk of negative comments • Any time a company opens itself up to open criticism there is the possibility of negative comments about a product or service. • Consumers want to know that the company that they bought the product from is fixing any issues quickly and listening to them.

34. Utility • Above all Social Media is a fantastic tool if used properly, but it takes time and dedication. • Imagine a scenario where something goes wrong with a product line. Social Media can be used to get your corporate apology and statement out extremely quickly to do damage control and get a statement out before your customers start forming a negative opinion. • It is a great tool, but every tool has to have safety precautions when using it.

35. Strategy • Ultimately, deciding if you should employ social networks as part of your marketing plan comes down to what is right for your business. • Can you afford to commit the time and effort to reap the rewards? • Social Media is definitely not a “Band-Aid” solution to a poor marketing plan, or to give you a sudden surge of sales. • Social Media is a committed effort to building relationships and a client base for the long haul.

36. Marketing • What are customers saying about your products and services? Is it good or bad? • Improve your messaging strategy based on real-time feedback of what customers are saying. • Trump the competition by understanding their customers’ needs and improving your product offerings.

37. Sales • Are there signs of interest in particular products or services that your industry hasn’t been able to fulfill? • Listening to what customers want can lead to your next innovative product or big deal.

38. Customer Service  • Manage customer complaints and improve communication channels to disgruntled customers. • Ensure customers that you are listening to their challenges and needs. • Engage with your customers to encourage loyalty

39. Future Trends

40. Social media makes big data even bigger • Big data essentially refers to the conglomeration of as much customer-related information you can get your hands on. • The concept behind its importance is that the more you know about your customers, the more you can connect with them -- and therefore make them more loyal customers. • For example, if we can combine proximity data with search history and purchase history with social media comments or discussions, we might be able to orchestrate addressable messaging to drive a prospect into a store or click and call without being "interruptive" to that consumer.

41. Mobile and entertainment will evolve • Wearable technology, like Google Glass, changes the way we think about constant connectivity. In fact, they just announced broader distribution and sales channels of Google Glass, and it will not be long before major eyewear brands license the technology. • Companies must make sure all of their content, sites, and certainly all of their social media platforms are ready to take advantage of this shift. • For social media, this means not just posting text heavy content, for example, but utilizing video, tappable post elements, and other tools to increase the richness of the customer experience and interaction • They should look beyond text-focused social media platforms and consider adding some that are more visually centered to the mix. Their complete strategy should engage users in the mobile experience and encourage them to generate user content (pictures, videos, and reviews) and to share it.

42. Marketing programs will reintegrate • Smart marketers have long worked to integrate marketing efforts across media vehicles and channels. • Brands will focus on mobile interactivity because that is where consumers spend more of their time.

43. Marketing programs will reintegrate • Instead of looking at social media as simply a way to communicate and sell to your customers, you should look at it as a valuable way to connect and build loyalty with your customers. • Doing this within the context of a layer on top of all your marketing efforts (online, offline, in-store) makes social marketing central, not separate to your brand communication. • Stop promoting to them and start relating with them leveraging your marketing communications efforts all the while. • What better way to do this than via social media?

44. Content marketing will grow -- with help • It is no secret today that content is the currency of visibility. • It is through relevant, useful, and informative content that companies can reach customers and even increase results. • However, the challenge for many businesses is bandwidth. The ability to easily and efficiently create and publish content has traditionally been a big stumbling block to content marketing. • New technologies will emerge that will help businesses automate content creation tasks by empowering and equipping employees and other customer facing entities to easily create/acquire, format, and publish content.

45. The power of your network will deliver • Brands that win in the future will be able to "power up" their network of employees, franchisers, or dealers to increase visibility and sales. • We will move from the "wisdom of the crowd" to "the power of the crowd." • As the internet becomes a crowded, content-filled place, it will be increasingly hard for businesses to be visible on social media. Coordinated strategies, particularly national to local marketing, will provide an advantage to businesses that can mobilize their networks first. • These changes are not really radical so much as they are a logical evolution of social media today. They are happening in part because fads come and go but also largely because social media has finally found its place in the smart marketing world.

46. Source • How Social Media Can Impact Business. Business Questions. http://nowsthetimetoask.com/?p=47 • K. Cisnero. 10 Benefits of Social Media for Business Every Skeptic Should Know. Hootsuite.2014. https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-for-business/ • R.Abrons. The Disadvantages of Using Social Networks as Marketing Tools. Demand Media. 2016. http://smallbusiness.chron.com/disadvantages-using-social-networks-marketing-tools-20861.html • M. Mandrusiak. The Disadvantages to Social Media Marketing. 4 Bravo Marketing. http://automatedbuildings.com/news/sep11/columns/110826030404mandrusiak.html • T. Peacock. How Does Social Media Affect Your Business?. Bluewolf. 2012. http://www.bluewolf.com/bluewolf-now/how-does-social-media-affect-your-business • C. Marentis. 5 predictions for the future of social media. iMedia Connection. 2016. http://www.imediaconnection.com/articles/ported-articles/red-dot-articles/2014/may/5-predictions-for-the-future-of-social-media/