Here's the thing: social media is here to stay. The challenge in little ol' South Africa is that many of us are confused about what it means for our businesses and how it affects consumer behaviour or rather opinion.
Assessing what and how to go about a social media strategy should be a burning question for all business owners right now, given the economic conditions and the fact that communities are self-evolving around brands and businesses, whether you are aware of it or not.
So ultimately a good way to go is to chart a course and open up your business to participation by the people who count - your customers.
A few questions
But how do you go about measuring what sort of community to build and what options exist that make sense for your business type and size? Here are a few questions to start with and broad possibilities available.
- Do you currently have two- way communications with your customers? Can you measure what your customers think of your product? Would you welcome pre-product launch feedback from your customers? If you answered yes to all three of those questions, you need a social media strategy.
- What is the size of your company and do you already have an existing consumer base? Is your product a high involvement product? If yes, then you need a social media strategy that includes building your own community site and provides a platform for existing customers to interact with your brand/products in an engaging way. Common user-interests and emotional engagement are the basis of good social media platforms and allow customers to interact about what they feel the current and future directions of your brand/products/services are.
- Have you got a medium or small company who seeks to reach new customers? Then the answer is you still need a social media strategy. Your strategy would be to piggy back on existing community sites and make your brand/products visible to large number of possible future customers.
- Do you have challenges in HR, where employees lack suitable access to training information, HR news and company policy, where communication between employees is a problem or the company culture is not filtering down? Well, a social media strategy is necessary and can be the most powerful HR tool ever! Connecting employees not only with management but with each other, making communication, loyalty and co-operation fluid and engaging.
To be dead honest about it, there are not many situations that a social media strategy can not address. Whether budgets are large or small there are creative and effective solutions to consider.
Scalable and dynamic
Social media strategies can also address multi-level challenges simultaneously, making it as scalable and dynamic as a social community itself.
The bottom-line is that social media can offer solutions that consolidate both abstract and substantive strategic goals for companies, brands or products.
It's happening as we speak...
