Why Social Media is a Must for Businesses

Social Media is one of the best ways for businesses to connect and communicate with their target markets. The benefits of Social Media include:

Maximize exposure for minimal cost

When compared to other forms of marketing, participation in Social Media offers a great opportunity to expose your company to the public at a much lower cost than other forms of marketing.

Monitor your brand and image

It is important to be aware of what is being said online about your company. Companies may take immediate action to capitalize on positive feedback and build on the momentum. Likewise, any concerns that are raised can be handled quickly before a problem escalates.

Generate leads

Social Media offers an inexpensive way to attract new customers and promote interest in your company. A network of “friends” can help generate leads by spreading the word about a company’s products or services.

Increase traffic to website

It is easy to direct Social Media users to a company’s website where they can learn more about the business and become engaged in the website.

Engage with customers

The casual environment of Social Media promotes conversation between customers with mutual interests. Also, discussions between representatives and current or prospective customers may easily take place.

Social Media: Monitoring, Marketing, Measuring, Testing, for Optimum Result.

A while back I posted a blog with a helpful list for those who were wondering how to find out if their social media was actually helping them or not. Well, I decided to add to the list and here are a few more items to keep an eye on.

1. Brand mentions in online media. So, you have a highly active social network and members are talking about your company, the company’s brands, your service/product names and maybe even your company url. Measure and track both positive, negative, and neutral mentions, and their quantities for all of them. This is also something that can be done even if you do not have an active social network. Because you are not active does not mean they will not talk about you through online mainstream media, forums, blogs, comments, posts, update, tweets, and reviews. Just remember “Stick and stones may break your bones, but, online, words can last forever.” If you don’t find the negative mentions and rectify them, others will stumble upon and judge for themselves.
2. Measure & Monitor Competitors. Know what your competitors are doing from a social media marketing standpoint, measure and Monitor their mentions, and know their share of voice compared to yours
3. Virality. Social members might be sharing Twitter tweets and Facebook updates relevant to your company, but is this info being reshared by their networks? How soon afterwards are they resharing? How many FoaFs (Friends of a Friend) are re-sharing your links and content?
4. Blog interaction. This is actually more than one metric lumped together. Blogs are part of a SMM (Social Media Marketing) toolkit, but only if you allow comments and interaction with readers by responding. If you’re doing this, encourage responses either directly in the comments section of blog posts, or via Twitter. (Use a blog widget that allows this.) If your blog’s content is suitable for social voting (Digg, Propeller, Mixx, etc.) or social bookmarking (Delicious, Stumbleupon) sites, install a blog plugin that displays the necessary sharing “buttons”, then track referrals back from those sites

As I said before, if you’re doing social media on your own or if an agency is doing it for you make sure that while they’re Marketing, they are Measuring and Testing for optimum Results.