Fifteen Ways Social Media Can Help You

Every day, I receive phone calls from companies and individuals alike who still don’t ‘get’ the purpose of social media. Why should they invest time and money in this new medium? Is it worth it?

In my opinion, social media is a MUST for all companies, no matter what the size. Here are some of the most important benefits social media provides:

1. Executed correctly, social media dramatically increases traffic to your website (and logically your ability to sell more products and services)

2. With social media, you can generate many more qualified leads. Some complain that social media attracts unqualified (and therefore uninterested) traffic. This is only true if you forget to use keywords in all your Social Web activities. Use keywords correctly and you are much more likely to be attract strong, qualified leads; people who have a precise interest in your product offers, ideas and services.

3. Social media allows you to create a worldwide community, expanding your reach well beyond your current geographic confines.

4. Executed correctly, social media will allow you to nurture a vibrant profitable business and increase your sales exponentially. Your business success will be built on you social community of loyal followers.

5. Social media will save you money; it is much less expensive than traditional marketing methods and will allow you to reduce your marketing budget dramatically.

6. Social media is an excellent way to conduct high quality market research. You can conduct polls, ask questions or simply converse with consumers and prospects to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of your offerings as well as identify any gaps in your product line-up.

7. Social media is an excellent way to build your personal brand as well as build brand awareness about your company.

8. Social media can improve your search engine optimisation efforts. Search engines like Google love social media tools from blogs to Twitter to video.

9. Social media can help you find and select talent. Ernst & Young was the trailblazer in this area. They were the first company to recruit on Facebook a few years ago, making companies who continued to do recruiting the traditional way look really boring.

10. Social media can help you develop new products. No one has done this better than LEGO. LEGO invites adult LEGO fans to participate as part of the LEGO team, relying on their feedback and ideas to create exciting new products.

11. Social media can help enhance employee relations. McDonalds has experimented in this area to great success. They conducted an employee American idol-like singing contest in which all the employees get to vote via social media for the best singer. Not only has this program brought the McDonald’s employees together, it has gone a long way to validate them.

12. Social media can provide you with excellent spontaneous customer feedback. For example, Starbucks asks people for suggestions and ideas about how to improve the Starbucks experience. Once they have the suggestions they even let other consumers vote on the suggestions. The system was an excellent way for customers to contribute their ideas about the company.

13. Social media is an impressive customer service tool. A case in point is Comcast. Once known for having absolutely atrocious customer service, Comcast has done a superb job of completely reversing their reputation. Most specifically, Comcast has a dedicated team that answers customer questions 24/7 through Twitter.

14. Social media is an excellent public relations tool and can definitely help you solve public relations crises. A few years ago, Jet Blue had a huge problem during a giant snowstorm on the East Coast. People were stuck on planes with no food or water for hours. Everyone was mad and spewing their anger all over the social media space. In response, Jet Blue created a video and posted it on YouTube. In it, the president of JetBlue apologised and committed to changing the airline’s policies. By doing so, he turned a lot of angry critics into fans.

15. In the same vein, social media can help you transform your enemies into advocates. The Coca-Cola Company can share a good story along these lines. A man was annoyed with Coke; he had won an all-expenses paid trip through the My Coke Rewards program but was having a problem collecting on his trip. So he tweeted to Coke complaining. Coke got the tweet and within thirty minutes was on the phone with the man and resolved the problem. The man was so impressed with Coke he changed his Twitter avatar to a can of Coke Zero- his way of acknowledging the company. Within thirty minutes, Coca-Cola had transformed an enemy into a life-long advocate!

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