A number of organisations today incorporate a social media strategy into the running of their business and, whilst some have a clear understanding of exactly what can be achieved, many fail to recognise its real benefit. No longer just another marketing channel, social media is now earning credibility as a fully integrated, strategic channel relevant to all parts of the business. With this comes a growing need to maximise benefits across all areas of the organisation.
Traditionally, social media has been successfully used by businesses as an extension of their customer services – consumers like the ease of being able to tweet a question as opposed to spending time on hold in a telephone queue. However, a great deal of further information and intelligence can be mined from conversations occurring via these channels; in one simple tweet you can gather an opinion on a product as well as their product preference. But that’s not all; the list is endless in terms of how social intelligence can be used beyond customer engagement.
Brand analysis
Individuals will often turn to social media to share experiences of a brand, both positive and negative. As such, having the tools in place to analyse these conversations and comments to get a feel for how your brand is vital.
Campaign Tracking
For marketers, ensuring every campaign achieves the results set out during planning is crucial. As the pressure mounts and budgets are squeezed it becomes increasingly important to deliver outstanding results, so businesses need to maximise every channel to measure success. Monitoring hashtags, tracking how many times a link is shared and counting retweets are a few ways of providing metrics against agreed deliverables.
Risk management
Unfortunately, this is an area many businesses forget about. More often than not social media is the first place consumers will go if they have something bad to say about your brand. Take the latest RBS glitch; with no information available elsewhere, customers quickly turned to social media to share frustrations. With the right technologies and teams in places, comments can be picked up quickly and re-directed in real-time in order for accurate and appropriate engagements to be made, mitigating the risk of problems spreading wider.
Competitive intelligence
Not sure what competitors are up to? Social media will quickly paint a picture for you, covering both what the brand does themselves and what consumers think of them. This helps to quickly understand what works and what doesn’t – and means you can benefit from other brands’ pitfalls.
It’s only a matter of time before companies recognise social media is integral to success and really get to grips with the benefits it has for the whole business and not just the marketing team. The insight that can be drawn from monitoring discussions and engaging appropriately is endless – businesses cannot afford to neglect it.