Social media has become a very popular marketing channel thanks to its unique potential to create relationships with customers. Unlike traditional marketing, it involves engaging with your customers, talking with them and showing them that you're listening. Social Media is all about sharing, and by making your brand part of your customer's social life you will get their loyalty and they will spread the word to their friends. Clever social media marketing can be of great benefit to any company, and there are many reasons to use it:Im
Improving Customer Engagement
With Social Media marketing, you are talking to your customers and they are talking back to you. That makes them feel more involved with your company, since it's marketing efforts become much more personal. If you do it right and actually engage with your customers, you will see them becoming more loyal your brand. However, as anything on the web 2.0, this is a two ways street. If you want your customers to listen to you, they need to know they are being heard as well. If your brand doesn't feel living and your communications are announcements that could be made by a robot, don't expect the attention starved social customer to give you their time.
Increasing Brand Credibility
For many customers, companies that use Social Media seem more open, and trustworthy. Showing no fear of having a conversation with your audience is a very positive trait for any company, specially compared to unresponsive customer service and cold, mechanic press releases. At the same time, a mistake can brand your company an hypocrite and be very damaging. Information spreads faster than light on the Internet, both the good and the bad.
Receiving Faster feedback
Having an active line of dialogue with your customers means that you can ask them questions, and get much faster results than by running a poll or waiting them to answer a newsletter call. Asking on Twitter "What do you think of our website redesign" will get you hundreds of answers in a matter of hours. Many pro bloggers already harness the power of instantaneous Internet communication by asking their followers questions and including their answers on their blogs.
Saving Money on Marketing
Social Media is, compared to traditional advertising, very low cost. Even paid ads on networks such as Facebook, highly targeted at specific profile types, are usually PPC and relatively cheap. And there's many ways of using Social Media as a marketing tool for free, from creating a Twitter account to a Facebook group of page, or even a company blog. However, Social Media requires time and dedication to keep the conversation with your customers alive, and you may need one or several members of the staff to include social media among their daily duties. It's not only about checking the Facebook page every so often, it's also about reacting to what people are telling you, and quick. Customers expect Social Media to be much more quicker to answer than traditional customer services through email.
Leveling Viral Marketing
If your Social Media strategy works well and your content is suitable for it, viral marketing is a natural consequence of it. If your customers consider your content fun, interesting or just worth sharing they will retweet it to their followers, post about it on their Facebook walls or Digg it. This will instantly put your brand in front of the eyes of thousands of new people that didn't know about you before, who may become customers and keep sharing your content.
Social Media marketing is still relatively young, and every day marketeers around the world are finding new reasons for using it, and new ways of doing so. Its benefits will depend of the type of company you're promoting, but overall they amount to higher customer loyalty and visibility, and thus better economic results. Social Media may not be for everybody, but if you think it will work for your company, give it a try and see in how many ways can it benefit your business.