Why do businesses need Social Media?
The materialization of social media platforms encourages consumer-to-consumer communication and accelerates communication especially between themselves and in most cases unknown consumers acting as a modern form of word of mouth marketing. In this context, social media platforms are a cost-effective and simple alternative to accessing and gathering consumer-to-consumer communication. This consumer-to-consumer interaction demonstrates conversations which drive important conclusions for brands through successfully applied content marketing across various social media channels.
Social media marketing is relatively cost effective compared to alternative media channels in correlation to building a lasting relation between brands and consumers. It costs only a fraction of what traditional media advertisements would cost; as most social media channels are free. Social media can also act as a cost effective approach to customer relationship building, as brands can actively listen and respond to their customers and their competitor’s customers for a fraction of the cost.
This form of relationship management can develop and help small businesses build trust relations with stakeholders. Social media helps businesses of all types including new start-ups and small-medium enterprises acquire information vital to their survival and growth acting as an accessible form of qualitative market research. It can be used to collect and store information on customers, competitors, and employees. Good social media management experience of small businesses can consequently help support customer loyalty and retention satisfying consumer customer service qualms, customers may experience.
However success through social media will take time for businesses and it is essential to build these relationships first. Consequently it is more important to consider that social media acts as a form of indirect selling, as a result of a successful social media marketing campaign that can help build brand awareness, customer acquisition and retention, low cost promotions, new product development and customer relationship marketing.
From increased brand awareness exposure, purchasing behaviour is further influenced through users interconnected (friends, followers, connections, etc) through their social media accounts, acting as a modern indirect form of word of mouth marketing, as a result of these interconnected users viewing activity from their friends, followers, connections, etc. However for marketers to successfully achieve this, their content needs to be creative with clear set marketing objectives.
If a business is to be successful through social media marketing tactics, they should treat it as any other marketing campaign and set clear objectives, which is a critical step in any communication and marketing planning process. Without a marketing campaign possessing clear objectives, the progression of engagement and inevitable successful or failure cannot be measured and evaluated, and unless we are able to measure the performance the campaign will be considered ineffectual.
By Chris Kyriacou