Welcome to the Digital Age of Business!

Social media is a growing resource for businesses. If used well, social media can help grow awareness for the business and increase consumer knowledge of the industry. In order to be successful, you must have a strategy with their use of social media.

As with anything done in business, goals must be set with social media. This will help measure the effectiveness of the social media for the business. These goals must be reasonable and measurable. Set benchmark dates periodically of what you want to see with your social media at each benchmark. When setting up the social media, you have to have a full understanding of who the consumer is. Know the target audience. You have to put yourself in the consumer’s shoes when thinking about what to do. If you do not think like a consumer, you will be thinking like a businessperson. Let’s be honest, consumers are not researching and buying products or services like a business person. They think about themselves. Therefore, in order to reach the target audience effectively, you have to think as they think. Think of all obstacles or challenges they might be facing. If you are selling adhesives that the consumers apply themselves, they might not know how to apply it correctly. Therefore, a blog explaining the application with a video giving a demonstration might be helpful. This will make the consumer be more likely to purchase from you versus the competitor. In addition, it will set you apart from the competition and give you a competitive advantage. In order to increase your competitive advantage, you should be doing exactly what the competition is doing and even more.

In addition to increasing your competitive advantage, you should be monitoring the social media and listening to your followers. This is called social listening. Social listening is imperative to the success of social media. The goal is to build relationships with consumers via the social media. This gives you a opportunity to talk to consumers directly based on what their needs might be. In Bill Tancer’s book, Everyone’s A Critic: Winning Customers in a Review-Driven World, he discusses social listening in a different way. He discusses reviews and how they can drive a business to success. One point he makes in this book is when consumers leave reviews, both good and bad, it is imperative for the owner or employee to respond to the review. If the consumer leaves a review, thank them for doing so and address anything that might need to be addressed. It leaves the reviewer with a good feeling of the business and any future consumers who see that interaction might think good thoughts as well. This is a form of social listening. Social listening can also be in the form of addressing a problem quickly through the social media. See example above.

Social media gives companies a way to talk to their consumers almost instantly. Companies who utilize this feature effectively typically have happy customers. The example to the right is from a personal friend. When she found out this new information about lululemon, she was very happy and never would have known this fact if lulu had not tweeted her back. In addition, this began a digital relationship with lulu and my friend. She tweeted them later that year with another question. They promptly responded with an answer. If lulu had not reached out the first time, my friend would not have tweeted them with her problems later on. Anytime she is curious about a lulu product, she tweets them. More and more companies are beginning to use this type of social listening to aid their business.

In order for social listening to be effective, a business must have a social community. If the previous consumer had not been following lululemon or had not known Lulu had a twitter, she might never have known about the rip off tag feature. Therefore, it is important to build a social community. First, you should find your promoters. The people that are loyal who are avid social media users will pop out easily. Reaching out to those people will be beneficial to both you and those users. My friend above is an avid social media user. She has tweeted at lululemon multiple times and then shares all her new found knowledge with other people who wear lululemon products. Reaching out to her is a good way for lulu to build their community. I did not know about that feature until my friend retweeted lululemon’s reply to her. After that, I followed lululemon on twitter because I wanted to be able to tweet them if I ever needed to in the future. This is a great example of how to start building a social community.

Social media has so many advantages to a business. In order for you to reap the benefits, you have to research and know how to use these tools effectively. Welcome to the digital age of business!