How to Use Social Media for Your Business

Social Media is becoming the need of organizations. Though many organizations are still far from this, but those who have adopted social media, are getting many good results from it. Here are few areas where organizations can use social media in their business processes.

Keep your eyes open

Let’s take an example of a very common scenario,

You bought a new laptop from a company XYZ. Unfortunately, you are not happy with the machine. You go to Facebook and update your status –

“My new XYZ laptop sucks.., it hangs when playing NFS Shift “

Your 1,000 friends are able to see that and they may comment as per their experiences from the relevant brands. So, a smart company can use these reviews for their brand improvements and customer support. Wouldn’t you be happy if you get a message from XYZ in your Facebook inbox saying-

“Sorry to hear this! Please let us know the problem. Call us at 9XXXXXXXXXXXX, one of our executives will reach you for solving your problem...”

And now you update your Facebook status –

“Hey, got a call from XYZ, they're gonna fix my problem…”

Again your 1,000 friends come to know that XYZ supports its customers in a friendly way.

A smart company can use multiple channels like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and many other review sites for their customer satisfaction.

Further, let’s go one step ahead. Technology can help you a lot here. Suppose, you aggregate all the posts, andcontent that is going on various social media sites regarding your brand, and you can pass them from any analytical filter and get a report as per your need. You can find how many people are talking good, bad, or shit about your product and what is the frequency.

You can use all the data for your brand promotion also. Now take an example: Suppose, you are a credit card company and you want to sell your credit cards. You can find from various social media channels how many people are talking about credit cards. Then with the help of technology, an automatic message can be sent to them regarding your offerings. In Twitter many brands do that. But, make sure that your messages should be genuine. It should not like spam.

Build a strong social profile

Social profiling is a naturally a good use of social media. If you have a strong social media profile, you can leverage that in your promotional activities easily. Think about a Facebook fan page. If you have a fan page of your XYZ company and you have 1,000 fans. Each of your posts and messages will reach your fans. Isn’t it a broadcasting (or advertising) channel? A neat and low cost advertisement.

Similar things with twitter too, if you have 1,000 Twitter followers, think about the reach of your tweet.

Coco-Cola is one of the best case studies on social profiling or social media by Facebook. The company is known for “making the best use of Facebook”. Their publicized Expedition 206 campaign is billed as the company’s largest social media project ever.

There are many other success stories you can find from Facebook.

Here we talk especially about Dell. Dell is usually known for its cost-effective methods that it uses and so it jumped in social media to reach people. At the ending of last year Dell reported that offers from its Dell Outlet Twitter account has booked more than $3 million in revenue attributable to its Twitter posts. It might sound like a small percentage for a company that books $16B in revenue annually–but a nice number however.

Stay in touch

Social media allows you to stay in touch with real world. It’s not possible and feasible to update your website or publish advertise for small activities of your company. Here social media comes- You can update your official blog , facebook fan page or wall and tweet about such activities easily. Blogs are playing a major role in updating the latest activities in current social media world. In fact I have some case studies where blog are used heavily to increase web traffic.

Joffrey’s Coffee & Tea Company is one of the best case study available for this. Their goals were to drive traffic to their site, increase buzz and branding in social media and the blogosphere and create a promotion which played into their brand essence. They targeted blogger for this brilliantly and got superb results like –

· 1500+ blogs participating

· Thousands of mentions for the campaign throughout the Web (Google search results here)

· Hundreds of links to the beta site and to Joffreys.com

· Hundreds of comments, responses and feedback from bloggers and the Web community

· Coverage on: Mashable , CNET, KillerStartups, MarketingFM, MattsCuppa, MoBuzz TV andmore than 150 more.

· Coverage by traditional media