Social media has assumed enormous importance in recent times and businesses are becoming increasingly aware that social mead can impact consumers’ buying behaviour:
Nearly 75% of consumers in USA and elsewhere report that social messages influence their buying decisions. Thus, your first task is to identify your target audience and then use the various social media tools to win them over.
Businesses without a significant social following will be crying in the wilderness when they post on Facebook, Twitter and other social media networks.
Your Companies’ employees can represent a powerful internal social marketing army—seldom adequately tapped. Your employees have tremendous potential, and they can rewardingly contribute to your social media reach.
Let us assume that your company has 100 employees, each of whom has an average audience of 100 followers. If all of those employees share the company’s updates, the potential reach is now 10,000 – a whopping ten-fold increase.
Of course, employees should never be forced to share corporate social media updates from personal accounts. This kind of sharing should always be voluntary.
When your employees share messages, your company not only expands its social media reach, but also create greater trust and engagement. Thus, encouraging social media use at the office is a critical first step. Twitter and Facebook can be powerful marketing tools.
But merely encouraging employees to use social media will not suffice. The employees have to undergo thorough social media training and the proper usage of social media tools.
The pitfalls of using social media incorrectly or inappropriately merit some form of extensive training and a copy of the instruction manual. Once employees are trained, updates can be shared in multiple ways. One option is to have employees set up unique social profiles linked to their business.
At companies where brand identity and employee identity are well aligned, this kind of sharing often happens spontaneously and prolifically. Alert employees when you have important news to get out via social media, and pre-craft messages to make it easy for them to share.
One of the merits of social media is that it’s not difficult to measure the results of your social media efforts. With a free tool like Hootsuite, it’s possible to see how often an individual message has been retweeted or precisely how many people a particular Facebook post has reached.