Social media has been and continues to be a major theme among individuals and businesses. People use it to connect with friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances, and even strangers. They use social networks, tools, and media to find commonalities amongst each other. Businesses use it as a way to market their products, brand, extend their reach, improve customer loyalty, acquire new customers and so on it is used as a tool to garner attention from the masses. In fact according to the Engagement DB, companies embracing social media grew revenues by 18 percent in the past 12 months.
Businesses are becoming more familiar and adapting social media, networks, and tools much more today than ever before as they see the power it has to extend their influence to their target base. They finally understand that social networking is not only about interacting with friends but also a way for them to interact with brands and companies.
According to Anderson Analytics’ May 2009 survey—52% of social network users had become a fan or follower of a company or brand, while 46% had said something good about a brand or company on a social networking Website—double the percentage who had said something negative (23%).
In fact more and more companies are using brand pages and applications to interact with their customers, one specific way is by using them to deliver coupons and offers to consumers to drive trials, store traffic and response. For example, a July 2009 Starbucks promotion, distributed coupons for a free pastry via Facebook and other social outlets. The chain was soon one of the top trending topics on Twitter and the top brand on Facebook, with more than 3.7 million fans.
Granted this is just one way businesses use social media. The other which has been proven to have an immeasurable effect is the way it enables businesses to hear from their customers, observe interaction between customers, increase trust and build credibility by expanding beyond traditional marketing messages and participate in “communities” with customers.
In fact social media is becoming so main stream that traditional companies — Ford, Levi Strauss, Best Buy, and Papa John’s, to name a few — are revamping their marketing operations to embrace their customers, rebrand products, and benefit from the social-media bonanza. In taking these steps, they have created online communities and encouraging their customers, follower, fans, or friends to directly talk and speak to them.
By no means are all traditional companies embracing social media, in fact most companies are taking a wait and see approach and continue to rely on TV, radio, and print for their advertising. However, companies like Best Buy and Ford who are forward thinkers are leading the way as they realize this is where their customers are and will be.
To that end I have listed below four ways social media can benefit companies from the start and if they stay the course can truly reap the rewards of social media.
•Customer Acquisition. Companies should integrated elements of Facebook and Twitter, the two most popular and wide reaching. A great example of using these as tools was the national pizza chain Papa John’s which added 148,000 fans on Nov. 17 through a guerrilla marketing campaign on Facebook. It offered a free medium pizza to anyone who signed up to be its fan on Facebook. The promotion gained it thousands of customers and drove its Web traffic up 253%. It now has more than 300,000 fans and hopes to top 1 million by the end of the year.
•Word-of-mouth marketing. Customers are the best evangelists for a company. Nine in 10 consumers trust their peers more than marketers, according to a recent survey of 25,000 by Nielsen. Starbucks tapped into WOM by starting MyStarbucksIdea in which customers can submit ideas for the company which are then voted on by other users, the best of which will be implemented by the company. One other example is by HP which used Twitter to power a scavenger hunt at a recent conference.
•Enhance customer service. Southwest Airlines heavily involved in the Twitter community, using the service to inform their customers know about deals among other things. In fact when a customer who had recently flown Southwest Airlines and found the airport check-in a two-button breeze, something which he mentioned on Twitter. Next thing he know he receives a “thank you” from the airline a few hours later.
•Speak directly to customers. Blogs, Twitter or Facebook can be an ideal forum for customers to offer their candid viewpoints to companies. For better or for worse companies respond to positive and negative feedback. Brian Kalma, Head of User Experience and Web Strategy of Zappos confirmed that bad reviews as well as good are a part of the consumer story and need to be respected and seen as an opportunity to provide better products and services.
As you can see, I am a believer that companies will have no choice but to embrace social media as that is where there customers are and will be going. The ones who are reluctant to will see their customers move to their competitors.
