Social networking
Social networking is a platform that helps businesses to engage their customers. Regardless of the type of industry, kind of services the company provides, or the products it sells, social networking helps to establish the company as a brand in the global market. It provides an interactive medium between the customers and the company by increasing the chances of directing leads to the website. According to recent statistics, 94% of businesses use social networking to promote their companies. Many marketers devote most of their time in developing and maintaining social media sites for their business portals. More than 58% businesses that used social media as their marketing strategy, have successfully increased their sales and gained quality traffic to their site within 3 years.
Involve social media, online media that supports social interaction with the customer and user contributions to assist online buying and selling of products and services. Engage extensive online communities and crowdsource ideas with social networking features, shoppable functionality and other custom systems for in-network interaction.
Challenges & Opportunities
Traditional Collaboration Tools:With the evolving industry needs, there is a need to raise the bar of communication and collaboration processes as well. Organizations are relying on age-old tools such as email, to collaborate with both consumers and employees. Customers, vendors and employees look for more natural collaboration modes through which they can share, relate and succeed. Opening up silos is the call of the hour.
Socializing Intranet:Typically, Intranet has become an old school, keeping in mind the technological makeover the industry is currently undergoing. Content is often processed and feels out of date. Internal business sites are lacking the dynamics of social communication. Organizations are required to revive the average intranet into a strategic and compelling corporate tool that puts people in the center of conversations.
Private Business Communities:Cut-throat competition prevailing in the industry requires businesses to work in close collaboration with trusted partners and vendors and focus on mutual success. A gated community where businesses can collaborate and communicate with customers, trusted channel partners and key stakeholders with ease, is a smart business move.
Customer-Facing Employees:In order to stay ahead of the curve, businesses need to keep pace with the changing requisites. Strong customer service department, equipped with social skills, can elevate sales and improve customer satisfaction ratio. Customer-facing representatives should have easy access to information that they need now, including competitive intelligence, marketing collaterals and live customer statistics. This is a pre-requisite, especially to increase productivity fourfold.
Social Software Solutions
Monitoring capabilities: Social media management tools can be complimented by native monitoring tools, or integrate with a social media monitoring software. It is likely that your company has multiple social media accounts across different platforms. Cross-channel monitoring features allow you to simultaneously track activity from all of your accounts. This increases efficiency, improves notifications and response times, and collects data into a centralized place.
Integration: Social media management tools collect data that can be incorporated with other programs such as customer relationship management (CRM) software. This allows you to see data about customer behavior overall and customer behavior specifically in the aspect of social media, which can help you further understand customer motivations and how to improve customer satisfaction rates. Some companies choose to integrate their social media management software with third-party customer service products in order to improve their support system and inquiry management.
Analytics: Following the implementation of your social media management software tool, you will begin receiving large amounts of data that will require analysis. Find a product that integrates with a social analytics software or collect and analyze data such as satisfaction scores, customer demographics, incident response and handling times, and social media presence statistics. You may also want a product that has the capability to visualize your data in an organized report. Having access to many types of data allows you to accurately analyze the effectiveness of your social media strategies.
Reputation Management: Social media management tools often offer features that help analyze your reputation and market presence on social media platforms such as brand competition monitoring, employee tracking, and alerts and notifications. It is essential to use your software to monitor alerts of social media mentions and conversations related to your company in order to engage with customers and respond to criticism.
Filtering: Customers differ depending on location, age, and other demographics. Therefore, it is important to analyze groups of customers in relation to their demographics. This allows your staff to further understand the needs and motivations of the customer base, and respond to any incidents accordingly. Select a product that offers the capability to filter data and results depending on demographics.
