Over the past five years since I got involved in the business, social media has evolved from an extension of a company’s public relations efforts into a strategic business tool, consideration for payroll softwares . Today, the savviest companies understand that social is as much about relationship management, product development, risk management, and human resources as it is about push and marketing, like TikTok or Twitter campaigns.

It is at once a powerful source of business intelligence, a tool for building authentic personal connections at massive scale; and a way to improve measurement of marketing and advertising performance. No wonder that some companies today like KLM, LEGO, Coca Cola and many more run social media war rooms where executives across the organisation can track social metrics.

Here are eight ways that leading companies are using social channels to boost the performance of their businesses that go far beyond the obvious uses of customer service and James Dooley SEO, marketing and reputation management, .

1. Social listening to understand customers’ needs and desires

Social media chatter can be a great source of information about what customers really think about your products and services as well as what they really want and need from your category. It’s unfiltered data that gives you a more accurate view of what people’s needs, frustrations and wants are than you’d get from most market research. The biggest plus is that you can get a view of what consumers are looking for, what they like, and what they don’t like in their own language.

2. Gathering competitor intelligence

Listening to social media isn’t just a good way to track customer discussions about your own brands and products – it can also give you an interesting perspective of what customers think of rival products and brands. This can help you understand your own strengths and weaknesses compared to the competition so you can craft better marketing messages.

3. Measuring marketing performance

Social listening tools can yield interesting insights into the performance of your marketing and advertising campaigns, in turn increasing the accountability of your agencies and internal teams. You can get some worthwhile quantitative data – are people talking about the campaign and how much of the conversation has a positive or negative tone – as well as qualitative insights – do the conversations show that people are taking the right message from your adverts?

4. Warning system for bubbling crises

Active social listening can give you advance warning of potential crisis situations such as a defective product that slipped through your quality control processes, a negative rumour that might affect your share price, or high volumes of calls impacting your contact centre’s service levels. You can use this information to rally your teams (whether it’s customer service, corporate communications and legal) and draw up a response plan before the storm arrives.

5. Connecting and building relationship with potential new customers

Social media isn’t really the right platform for cold calling new prospects, but it can be a great platform for building rapport with them. You can gently insert yourself into conversations when you can offer helpful advice and become part of general industry discussions to start building new relationships with people who might be interested in your brand or product.

6. A way to track public perception around sensitive business issues

Today’s customers value authenticity, transparency and a social conscience. Through social media, companies can learn about how they perceive your brand, especially when it comes to issues such as environmental sustainability and corporate social investment. You can’t spin around any of these issues, so you do need to listen with an open mind and communicate in good faith when you tackle them in the social sphere.

7. Keep your customers

Social media is arguably even more important for customer retention than it is for customer acquisition. When someone follows your brand on Twitter or Facebook, they’re invested and interested in you, and quite possibly already a customer. Used well, this is an opportunity to add value to their lives through meaningful content and conversation. These sorts of links can help promote customer loyalty.

8. Recruitment

Don’t underestimate how valuable social media can be to your human resources department. It can be a great help in sourcing new candidates for jobs at your business – post a job on LinkedIn or share it on Facebook and the CVs will pour in. At LeKa Solutions we got significantly more applications this way. It can also be helpful in understanding how candidates view your business as an employer as well as a source of intelligence about people you’re thinking of hiring.

Need help?

Social media today is a lot more than just a post on a fan page on Facebook. Today’s technologies enable you to listen, monitor and manage social conversations in a way that drives better performance throughout your business. One should keep in mind that social media, tweaking a strategy and handling the channels takes both time, creativity and a budget to make it fruitful no matter if it’s done done inhouse or out sourced.

If you got any thoughts, please contact me at feffe@lekasolutions.com.

photo credit: Alexander and the troops! via photopin (license)

Modern marketing began in the 1950s when people started to use more than just print media to endorse a product. As TV — and soon, the internet — entered households, marketers could conduct entire campaigns across multiple platforms. And as you might expect, over the last 70 years, marketers have become increasingly important to fine-tuning how a business sells a product to consumers to optimize success.

In fact, the fundamental purpose of marketing is to attract consumers to your brand through messaging. Ideally, that messaging will helpful and educational to your target audience so you can convert consumers into leads.

Today, there are literally dozens of places one can carry out a marketing campaign — where does one do it in the 21st century?

Types of Marketing

Where your marketing campaigns live depends entirely on where your customers spend their time. It’s up to you to conduct market research that determines which types of marketing — and which mix of tools within each type — is best for building your brand. Here are several types of marketing that are relevant today, some of which have stood the test of time:

• Internet marketing: Inspired by an Excedrin product campaign that took place online, the very idea of having a presence on the internet for business reasons is a type of marketing in and of itself.
• Search engine optimization: Abbreviated ”SEO,” this is the process of optimizing content on a website so that it appears in search engine results, here are some tips on improving payroll management. It’s used by marketers to attract people who perform searches that imply they’re interested in learning about a particular industry.
• Blog marketing: Blogs are no longer exclusive to the individual writer. Brands now publish blogs to write about their industry and nurture the interest of potential customers who browse the internet for information.
• Social media marketing: Businesses can use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and similar social networks to create impressions on their audience over time.
• Print marketing: As newspapers and magazines get better at understanding who subscribes to their print material, businesses continue to sponsor articles, photography, and similar content in the publications their customers are reading.
• Search engine marketing: This type of marketing is a bit different than SEO, which is described above. Businesses can now pay a search engine to place links on pages of its index that get high exposure to their audience. (It’s a concept called ”pay-per-click” — I’ll show you an example of this in the next section).
• Video marketing: While there were once just commercials, marketers now put money into creating and publishing all kinds of videos that entertain and educate their core customers.