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In the present times, social media is surely playing a very pivotal role in order to get a word out about any business, regardless of its size and nature. Without a doubt, social media marketing is turning out to be an exceedingly popular tool among businesses of all sizes as it is helping them provide the exposure to the audience, no matter which part of the world they are in. In addition to this, social media also provides them the opportunity to grow and enhance the relationship with the potential buyers and the target audience. LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook fans are normally the people who are aware of the organization i.e. the potential customers and they are most likely the people who share the word with their social circle about the businesses’ products or services. By using social engagement strategies, an organization is now easily enabled to strengthen the relationships with the fans and ultimate connections. The reason why organizations choose the social media strategies is that it exposes the products and services to the related audience but also provides a chance to get new customers. (“Why Social Media Marketing? 10 Ways Social Media Can Help Grow Your Business”, 2013).
The best thing about using these social media websites is that they are totally free unless one wants to use their extensive advertising applications and features. Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and LinkedIn offers total free accounts which can be activated by simply providing a single valid email address. LinkedIn do offer its users with paid accounts as well which are basically formed by the users with a necessity of more dynamic and customer focused needs. The dynamic usability of these social media websites has broken down all the barriers of age, nationality and gender (“Why Social Media Marketing? 10 Ways Social Media Can Help Grow Your Business”, 2013).
Another added advantage to the businesses is that the social media websites have enabled them to provide instant satisfaction to the target audience. Social media websites can be used to share the email newsletters across the social networks and the content shared can open up a new audience and can finally generate a buzz every small business strive for at the initial level. Social media website’s application can be downloaded for free to use it on the mobile phones and both the customer and the company can stay updated on-the-go (“Why Social Media Marketing? 10 Ways Social Media Can Help Grow Your Business”, 2013).
There are several advantages of using the social media websites for a business. It increases the awareness about the products and services which in return gives a better understanding of customer perception and response of the brand. All sorts of positive and negative feedback can be identified and incase applicable quick measures can be taken. Social media websites usage can increase the customer base of a brand. In addition to that the feedback of the customers can be used to identify the new features and new service or product opportunities in the market. The traffic can be routed from the social media websites to the official website of the organization which can easily be monitored and measured. Targeted and niche market can easily be identified using the additional features of the social media websites which in long term can help to develop the target marketing activities (“The New Conversation: Taking Social Media from Talk to Action”, 2010).
There are certain drawbacks of using the social media websites for businesses as well which are necessary for business owners to understand. Once a business decides to route the updates through social media websites, they need to manage the social media network in order to maintain the visibility to the public. The organization may face difficulty in measuring the return on investment. There is a possibility of the reputation of the brand on social media. Social media websites need urgent and prompt responses to both positive and negative feedbacks to the customers. Failure in doing so may result in damage in relationship with the customers. One should be very well aware of the advantages and disadvantages of using the social media for marketing purposes. By doing so, the business owners can easily market their products and services and take the full advantage of this free medium.
Social Media marketing has also helped Pepsi to increase customer insight to a great extent. It can be said that Pepsi has been able to successfully and unquestionably transform the digital experiences in support of its consumers. PepsiCo has used DEWmocracy promotions on the social networking websites to get the exact customer insights. This experiment has led to the creation of several new varieties of Mountain Dew brand. The evidence of this success is the increased sale of equal to 36 million cases since 2008 (Hutson, 2010). In addition to this, PepsiCo has been thoroughly working towards the recognition of Gatorade that is also a sports drink. PepsiCo wants to make this recognized as the leading participatory product on the planet. For this purpose, PepsiCo has created a “war room” in its marketing department to track the brand on social networking websites. The product and campaign launches are analyzed and tracked in PepsiCo by custom built data visualizations and dashboards. All of the feedback from these social networking websites are gathered on daily basis and integrated into marketing and products. This integration helps optimizing the landing page of the company’s website as well. By doing all this, PepsiCo finally succeeded in increasing the length of visitor interactions with online properties of Gatorade’s, viral sharing and ultimately the sales (Payne & Frow, 2013).
Martell Home Builders is another business that has used Social Media Marketing to its advantage and is based as Atlantic Canadian home builders. Martell heavily relied on realtors in the past to keep their business moving. After they embraced social media, they successfully created the direct-to-consumer model and this resulted in the elimination of the middle man which was bringing business to the company. Martell focused on content creation and used blogs strategy to get the home buyers and to satisfy their needs. Martell grabbed the attention of the homebuyers by introducing “14 Must-Have Tools for New Homeowners ” and the other one was “Home Staging Tips & Techniques”. Now, 86% customers are the leads generated from consumers directly. There are social media channels buttons on their website as well. By placing the social media buttons on the website, Martell easily gathered the attention of the visitors and this ultimately encouraged interaction. Martell added geo-location technology and mounted it in the vehicles of the contractor’s. This helped the customers to always know the location of their contractor while he/she is on the job. This extended the definition of customer services for Martell (Zimmerman & Ng, 2013).
With the help of several brilliant and innovative strategies, Martell revamped the homebuilding experience for customers as well as the company itself. Among all the great strategies, showing the photo galleries of the already built or under construction homes was the best. The customers can check the status of the building in process and can share these pictures with their friends and families using the social media websites. This strategy enhanced the visibility and reach of Martell. Martell simply did the things by thinking outside the box. The customers feel more serviced and satisfied with the contractors when they can easily get the location and check the updates anytime they want. Real time, socially connected customer service can create trust with the clients which can be beneficial for any type of business (Zimmerman & Ng, 2013).
Another business i.e. Giantnerd has also taken full advantage of social media marketing to its advantage. Giantnerd sells equipment for outdoor activities like biking, hiking and snowboarding. Giantnerd is one of the best examples of the companies which used the social media integration successfully. The emphasis of the company is to provide most value to the customers by becoming friends in the process of transaction. Giantnerd integrated the social networking websites into each and every aspect of their website. They have successfully created a social network on their own website which is totally different from any other social media website. They have introduced the one-click process to join the network on their website which made it fast and very easy for the customers. They use a term called “nerds”, and nerds can get discounts on their membership when they join the network. Giantnerd added the Like button on the website as well which made it possible for the fans to get exclusive deals and promotions. If we talk about increased ROI by using the social media tactics, YES, Giantnerd average order increased by 50% after the introduction of the LIKE button on their website (Goldman, 2013).
While researching for the products on Giantnerd website, Giantnerd use multiple social methods for providing information to the potential customers and getting useful feedback in return. Such an example is WikiNerdia, same as Wikipedia, customer can check the various products and they can even edit the information as well. This makes the experience more interactive. WikiNerdia allows the users to ask questions and all the nerd community members answer the questions. By doing this the WikiNerdia let their customers sell for them as they answer all the queries which are posted on the website. People normally trust the reviews and answers of the customers more than the brand. Giantnerd gets the benefit of their fan engagement and ultimately the brand trust increases. Customers can be your sale force and work for any company if the company can get the benefit by engaging the audience. A brand must think of multiple opportunities for the customers so that they can spread the word about the company. Real-time engagement opportunities and exclusive social communities are the tools which can turn existing customers to word-of-mouth advocates. By using these tools intelligently and brilliantly, like Giantnerd and Martell did, any company can get the benefits of the social networking websites (Goldman, 2013).
Social Media will have a huge impact on business over the next decade, especially on the recruiting matters. Social media technology presents exciting opportunities for the recruitment industry. A research has highlighted that Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are the most used social media websites by hiring professionals. Among the emerging social media websites there are two names of Viadeo and Xing as well. 35% of the job hunters in Sweden log onto social networking websites each day according to a survey. Recruiters are paying for getting some specified services to companies like Jobvite for the mining of the social networks and to gather the holistic data on the candidates across multiple social media platforms. There are websites using more traditional recruitment techniques of referral hiring. There are more recruitment tools available to hiring professionals which enables them to get the automated referrals from employees inside their social networks. Diversity and security lacks as well as the lack of personal data. The data can be accessed by any company or even the websites sale the data of the social networking websites. Recruiters are researching to form the ways in which they can easily provide the extension of their services to the mobile device through the development of applications. Location based tools are also in view to be used as recruitment channel. These innovations are generally used to hire people within the sectors of digital media and creative sector but there are reports which show that they are now being used within the professional service industries as well. The advantages and benefits they are getting are visible enough. Employers are realizing that more focused working with the recruitment solution providers is more important in order to get the right candidate for the right job at the first time. This can surely save the significant amount of resources and can result in a better ROI in the long run. Social media websites are up all the time and recruiters and employers can interact 24/7 for better results. This is visible that social media websites revolutionized the hiring processes through its dynamics (“The Impact of Social Media on Recruitment”, 2011).
There are, however, a number of skills that are needed for improving so that the advantages can be derived from the mentioned changes brought by social media in businesses. Businesses are required to enhance community management to develop a relationship of trust with the consumers/customers as well as the employees. Search Engine Optimization or SEO is one of the most significant tools for the development of all types of content on social media. Therefore, it is necessary to acquire basic principles of SEO and grasp them efficiently. A social media manager must develop an eye for creativity and a production process sense for art creation. Polished writing skills are also a prerequisite for a social media manager as no website or social medium can succeed without attractive content. A social media manager is also required to be attentive to what is going on in his/her surroundings so that he/she may learn on a constant basis so that the company may not fall behind. It is also important to have a deep knowledge and understanding of both conventional business analytics and web analytics.
References
Goldman, J. (2013). Going Social: Excite Customers, Generate Buzz, and Energize Your Brand with the Power of Social Media. New York: AMACOM.
Hutson, B. (2010, July). A Lasting Engagement: A Consumer Products Professional Works to Create the Ultimate Brand Experience for Buyers.Black Enterprise, 40 (12), 51+. Retrieved May 17, 2013, from http://www.questia.com/read/1G1-231997483/a-lasting-engagement-a-consumer-products-professional
Payne, A., & Frow, P. (2013). Strategic Customer Management: Integrating Relationship Marketing and CRM. New York: Cambridge University Press.
The Impact of Social Media on Recruitment. (2011). Nigel Wright. Retrieved May 18, 2013, from http://www.nigelwright.com/Assets/Documents/TheImpactofSocialMediaonRecruitment.pdf
The New Conversation: Taking Social Media from Talk to Action. (2010). SAS. Retrieved May 18, 2013, from http://www.sas.com/resources/whitepaper/wp_23348.pdf
Why Social Media Marketing? 10 Ways Social Media Can Help Grow Your Business. (2013). Constant Contact. Retrieved May 18, 2013, from http://img.constantcontact.com/docs/pdf/why-social-media-marketing.pdf
Zimmerman, J., & Ng, D. (2013). Social Media Marketing All-in-One For Dummies. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc..
