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Internet Marketing Site Promotion Improve Customer Relations with Social Media
Internet Marketing Site Promotion Improve Customer Relations with Social Media
| Improve Customer Relations with Social Media |
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| Written by David Baxter |
| Thursday, 26 November 2009 19:23 |
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Social media first began to be commonplace around 2005. Today, social media sites such as MySpace and Facebook are popular among all age groups, although they began as a place for young people, mainly, to gather and keep in touch. Today, social media sites have become means by which companies, too, can improve customer relations. As of 2009, social media has begun to completely change the way corporations manage customer relations in their entirety. According to IT research and advisory company Gartner, by 2010 60% of Fortune 1000 companies will be using social media in some form as a way to improve customer relations. That's the good news. Gartner also posits that over half of the companies using social media for this function will do it wrong and actually harm customer relations. Gartner suggests that companies focus their analysis on customer online buying in order to offer a direct calculation of return on investment in terms of sales and customer loyalty coming through social media sites. Gartner says that there are four steps businesses need to pursue to successfully use social media to manage customer relations. The first step is clearly defining the purpose of the social media initiative. Second, they must be willing to give up some degree of control over the medium, because the public wants some degree of ownership of the relationship as a reward for participating. The third step is that companies actually have to focus on rewards for those customers that participate in social networking. For example, they may vote on, rate contributions or information on the site, etc. The fourth and final step is that companies must have their own in-house staff who can head up social media customer relations as an initiative. Using social media for customer relations should never be done as a throwaway. Instead, someone should be devoted to its use and impact full time, with ancillary staff as necessary. There is no question that social networking has changed the behavior of a critical mass of individuals as customers and prospects. According to Gartner, they can no longer be described adequately based on demographic information, which is the usual target for corporate customer relations efforts. Of course, that said, it's not going to do you a lot of good to spend a lot of time or effort in undertaking social media as a focus with any seriousness unless you know it's going to pay off by driving truly valuable traffic to your company website. Non-linear Creations undertook a study for a year focusing on five social media sites and the effects they had on customer relations. The sites included MySpace, LinkedIn, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Twitter. After a year, Non-linear Creations determined that social media sites drove about'% of its sites visitors from referring sites in aggregate. In the Case of Non-linear Creations, Linkedin and Facebook outperformed the other social media sites. That's important, but it isn't the whole story. What about conversion rates? Non-linear Creations measured conversion rates by whether visitors downloaded one of their white papers, subscribed to their blog or newsletter, or contacted them by phone or email. In this case - driving real prospects - Linkedin outperformed the other sites. Traffic from Linkedin was much more likely to convert than the average site visitor. Other social media sites actually underperformed the average. LinkedIn is not guaranteed to give your company the bona fide results that Non-linear Creations got with its research, to be sure. The type of business you have probably matters quite a lot. It's not really understood just yet what the less obvious results are in reaching customers online whereby customers feel as though the company or brand is listening to them and cares about them enough to interact as they choose. People dislike customer support call centers, for instance, because it feels so anonymous. It gives them no sense of relationship to the brand. There have been no obvious downsides seen as yet when it comes to using social media for customer service, so it seems to be in a company's best interests to use this form of contact. It certainly isn't hard to create accounts on social media sites. The hard part is in actually interacting with customers on them, listening to them, and analyzing your online visitor numbers to see which social media sites give you the most return on investment in terms of online sales or some other metric. At that point you'll have to determine how much effort to put into making under-performing social media referrers more effective. About the Author: To find out more about Social Media, visit David Baxter's site www.SmartMediaInnovations.com to help strengthen your customer relations today. Kindly provided by LJ-Marketing.dk You are welcome to use this article on your own website, if you include the link just before this text. |
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