Social Media for Business

Despite the hype surrounding social media, its advantages cannot be overemphasized. With several active platforms to share information, it would be fatal for a company to use them without a proper marketing strategy.

‘Social media’ is a collective term for a rich and diverse platforms, web sites and online tools to help people come together to express themselves, interact, and share. In a marketing perspective, social media serves a variety of marketing objectives. It is used to share information and experience amongst users, to communicate, to entertain and to jointly interact with the company or better interact with the people in these companies. Of course it is also used to refer to businesses, brands, products, services and customer experiences.

Blogs

Companies can blog in different ways. You can create a separate or external blog for the company that is independent and different from the website, which can leave the initiative to the company’s employees, who have something to say and who can create their own blog.

It is better to have a blog on the company website or connected to where interested parties can express interest in the company. The advantages of this approach are enormous: an open and transparent, search engine optimization and fast real-time interaction with users – and in this context, the relevance of content is an important factor.

Social networks offer their services for users to interact with others who share what they are doing, upload photos, share to email, etc. There are also social networks specifically for professionals, the most famous is undoubtedly LinkedIn.

The goal of marketing in social networks is to remain aggressive and promote medium to long term conversions into trade contacts.

 

The micro-blogging

The basic function of the micro blogging is to give the opportunity to share status updates and also exchange messages, information and links to connect to others and both private and public communication. Twitter is best known in this field, but it is not the only one.  Twitter is the second most popular social media site behind Facebook.  Additionally, it allows direct contact with pioneers in various fields. Twitter users are often people in any form of influence: Blogger, journalists, opinion leaders or followers of a brand, among others.

 

Multimedia Social sharing platforms

Online videos on sites like YouTube, Flickr images or PowerPoint and PDF presentations on Slideshare, there are dozens of online services where you can upload, share and tag multimedia content. Most of these sites contains options that integration to other users with the ability to include content, as appropriate, on their websites, social networking sites or blogs. The most commonly used in the marketing websites are mainly sites with online video, slide and – to a lesser extent – image-sharing sites.

As you can see, there are multitudes of ways to communicate through social media on the Web, they need to use more wisely.

Tips to monitor social media

• One of the main activities of social media on brands is to follow what is said of them, as well as trends and market response. Consider the social feedback as an opportunity to optimize your cross-channel marketing in real time.

• Do not be defensive: the view of your customer is important

• Use the information gathered to improve your communication strategy

• Give customer the best experience

• Establish a reputation of your plan

• Define resources and structural requirements for the setting up

• Listen to the feedback and answer them adequately

• Set some guidelines

• Give people the channels for them to give you their feedback

• Keep lines of communication open

• Measure and improve

• Do not listen, act!