Why use Social Media?

Author: Arjun Thomas
Filed under: Enterprise 2.0, Social Media

Tuesday
Aug 4,2009

The big question. Why use Social Media?

If your companies answer is “because everyone else does it”, chances are they haven’t really thought this through. So what’s the first step? Go back to the drawing board and get an understanding of what it has to offer, its pro’s and cons.

There are a number of reasons why you want to embark on this journey and listed below are just a few of them.

Reach out to existing customers
Tap into new customers
Promote your brand
Recruit new talent
Be “Cool”

While I’m sure there are a number of other reasons you can add l’d like to focus on just these for a now. Building brand loyalty and awareness can be done rather well using a well thought out social media strategy.

Reaching out to existing customers : The voice of your customer is probably the most important thing you have and creating a solution that allows them to constantly give you feedback is probably a smart thing to invest in.

Tap into new customers: A social platform loaded with content and interactivity is a great way to attract new customers to your product and services as well as give them an idea of what other customers think about it.

Promote your brand : Social Media gives you a long lasting and interesting channel to promote your brand.

Recruit new Talent : Social media platforms are a great way to attract talent to your organization as it allows them to get a better understanding of your company and the way you do business .

Be “Cool” : Let’s face it, with social media being leveraged successfully by a number of organizations there is pressure to adopt it and not be left behind.

Choose your medium : This would probably be one of the most important decisions you’ll make. The fact that you have an endless list of tools at your disposal really doesn’t help. ( This is where putting together a strategy helps )

The most popular of these are of course:

Blogs
Micro blogging tools ( twitter )
Collaboration tools (wiki’s )
Multimedia ( You tube, Flickr )
Podcasts

What makes this work investing in?

Reach : The volumes of people you can reach if you use this medium are mind boggling, you even pull in people that might not be part of your key demographic.
Usability : Using social media tools has become second nature to most of your customers out there ( if they’ve been on the web for a while ).
Cost effective : As mentioned before the return on something like this far exceeds that of traditional media channels.
Permanence : Traditional media cannot be altered, a social media platform is a living, constantly evolving platform that allows you to connect with customers constantly.
Recency : One of the biggest advantages is of course sending messages and information almost instantly to user already tapped into the system.
Analytics : Modern Social Media Platforms allow you to generate the kind of analytics you can only dream of in traditional media.

Advantages

The biggest advantage over standard mediums of communication is the ability to connect with your consumers and users and get feedback. Its a bidirectional flow of information that will get scary at times if you don’t understand it or be proactive in dealing with issues that will most certainly crop up.

It’s cheap!! ( well cheaper, than alternative means of communication )

There is a sense of transparency with social media, essentially because people are free to say what they want without the fear of being gagged. Your consumers will open up to you more and you’ll get a whole lot more honest feedback. Just be very careful you do not violate this trust by being too controlling, this goes against the very nature or social media tools.

Tackling issues before they snowball, Catching something when its still a minor irritant for one consumer is worth its weight in gold before it spiral out of control on the world wide web.

These are just some of the thoughts I had around this topic, feel free to add you own or disagree.

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