"Social media is coming of age. Since the emergence of the first social media networks some two decades ago, social media has continued to evolve and offer consumers around the world new and meaningful ways to engage with the people, events and brands that matter to them. Now, years later, social media is still growing rapidly, becoming an integral part of our daily lives. Social networking is now truly a global phenomenon."
That's said, if we care about getting a message across to customers, helping them identify with our brand, interacting with them, learning from them, giving them a great customer experience. Then we need to understand the significance of the social media today.
First of all, it is important to understand that social networks and blogs continue to dominate Americans’ time online (accounting for nearly a quarter of total time spent on the Internet), according to a recent Neilson Report on social Media. So why aren’t all companies using such an influential, and not to mention FREE, tool to interact with customers and better sell their brand? This is probably because they don’t know about the powerful and innovative social selling techniques that are available today. Social Selling: Your business needs it because your customers are already there, and your competition is already doing it.
Here are three popular strategies that proactive companies are using to strengthen their customer relationships and generate leads through social media channels. We can review why these strategies can help improve our company’s social presence.
- Social Logins
- Responsive Social Care (customer service through social media)
- Analyze Social Dashboards
Social Logins
What is it?:
A social login is a useful and fairly new tool that is being used by companies of all industries. Social logins (with Gigya for example) offer visitors the option to register or sign-in to your Website and mobile app with one of their existing social network identities.
What is the potential business impact?:
By allowing social logins, users avoid creating and remembering another username and password, while giving your company access to rich social data, such as: age, sex, demographics, hobbies/interests, social networks, etc. that can be stored in your company’s internal database. The personal information that is captured through these social logins can provide invaluable insight to assist your company in analyzing your brand audience to create targeted email marketing campaigns, flag highly-influential users, and influence company branding.
Responsive Social Care
What is it?
Customer service through social media has become an immediate need for global brands and 47% of social media users engage in social care (Neilson Report). When your company’s image is on the line, it is important to understand the need for social care. Utilizing responsive social care allows your company to take a quick-reactive role for customers that voice their questions and complaints on social channels.
What is the potential business impact?:
In Michael Brito’s book, Smart Business, Social Business, he stated that people “put a surprising amount of trust and credibility in employees of companies” and, “41% of people believed conversations with company employees to be the most credible specialist sources of information.” So, when your customers have a question or are facing an issue with your services, reply to them directly. Whether responding publicly through the same social media channel, or inviting them to a private chat to assist them with their issue, your personal social service will help retain customers, increase liking, and build overall brand trust.
Analyze Social Dashboards
What is it?
Social dashboards create an easy way to track and update social metrics like Facebook Likes, company mentions, and fan activity on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis.
What is the potential business impact?:
Determine success factors that make sense for your company, and then build a dashboard to help monitor and analyze social activity to achieve those goals. Continue to create and adjust goals for growth based on trends and what’s working for your company. Whether you create these dashboards manually or use a social CRM tool like those listed below:
Useful tools that can assist with determining your social media success:
- SocialMention is a free tool that collects the total number of conversations about your brand
- A more robust tool such as Radian6 from Salesforce, has a widget that calculates your share of voice. (The formula for share of voice: # of conversations or mentions of your brand / # of conversations or mentions about competition).
- Google Analytics measures how much traffic is being referred to your Website from the various social channels. *Try segmenting brand mentions by each individual social channel to uncover opportunities for improvement. You may find that your efforts on one particular channel are going unnoticed, but excelling on another channel.
- Google Alerts helps you keep current on your competitors. Learn about what they are doing right, their weaknesses, and discover possible opportunities for you to capitalize on.
(This guest post was written by Alissa Harwood.)
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