Social Media Strategy for your business, not just your marketing!
When it comes to planning out a social media strategy for your business, you could be forgiven for thinking that the reason you are harnessing the power of social media is purely to market your company. It is fair to say that many businesses do just this and it is indeed a good way to tell the world what your company has to offer. However, if your sole purpose of using a social media strategy is simply to market, then you could be missing out on a trick.
If as a company you can introduce a cross functional team of social media experts across several areas of your business who can all work together to send out and indeed gain vital information, then this will be of great benefit to your company. Let’s take a look…
So what departments can benefit from A Good Social Media Strategy?
Customer service team
Nowadays if consumers need to get in touch they don’t simply want to be restricted to letters, the telephone or emails. Instead studies have shown that product users would be happy to interact with companies on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. By developing a great social media strategy customer issues can be dealt with quickly and efficiently.
Sales team
An underused aspect of social media platforms such as Facebook is for finding and following up on sales leads. With a little bit of planning it’s easy to find groups of people who are looking for a product or service that you have to offer. Or alternatively, to find people who are disgruntled with the service or products of your main competitors. Either way, these people can be followed up on giving real measureable returns on your Social Media Strategy Investment.
HR Team
Not only is Social Media a very effective tool in identifying candidates, recent surveys have also shown that almost 30% of employees felt that it was important for their employer to have a Social Media presence. Social Media can also be a very effective tool for both formal and informal communication within the company.
Public relations
If you already have a web presence, then by keeping a close eye of what people are saying about your product/service on social media platforms, blogs or forums and managing those comments means that you are able to adopt a good rapport with your consumer base and build your brand. Online reputation management is an increasingly important element of any Social Media Strategy.
Purchasing department
As a larger company you may have a purchasing department. This being the case then a great use of social media is to be able to ‘check out’ companies you plan on doing business with before you jump in with both feet. Hear what people are saying about them and check out reviews so that you can make an informed buying decision. Social Technologies have also enable crowdsourcing and other efficiencies in many areas.
Marketing team
An advantage to using social media in marketing is that it is easy to track people’s opinions about your latest campaign. Simply get the campaign going and gauge the reaction. It’s a pretty good way of finding out quickly whether your campaign is working or not. If it isn’t, it can easily be adjusted. Social media can also be used for market researchbefore you enter into a full blown campaign. Use a monitoring tool and keyword searches to hone the areas that you want to targe.
As you can see a good social media strategy needs a holistic approach which looks at all areas of your business and not just purely from a marketing perspective.
If you feel that you are not fully leveraging the power of the social media explosion to help your business, then contact ePresence to discuss your social media strategy today.
