How many times have you seen an advertisement placed on the side of Facebook that seemed to be everything you're interested in? How many company pages and tweets do you follow for upcoming coupons, information and promotions? Maybe you're a big fan of your product or a certain company or maybe you have a problem you want to voice to someone. Compliment or Complaint, Critique or Criticism you head over to their page, hit their hashtag, comment on their blog or on yours and tag the company in the post- in every one of these ways businesses are benefiting from today's Social Media. Representatives check what people are saying or posting, they share customers praises and success stories and address complaints and problems. Businesses can advertise and promote by word-of-tweet and share, effectively advertising at relatively low cost. Most of all businesses have a real chance to foster a community, to show people that they care about their customers, employees and their product/service quality and reputation.
There are many different types of social media, and not all of them are for the public. Some social networks are private, allowing employees to connect to each other and their place of employment in new, more intimate ways. You may meet people from different departments with interests similar to yours that you may never have met otherwise. Companies can post events and event pictures, announce special work-relates awards or anniversaries to show that the people they employ actually do mean something to them.
More general and specialized formed of public social media are seen everyday; Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Pintrest and of course Blogs are just some of the ways in which businesses are getting closer to their consumers.
Socialnomics by Erik Qualman provides more in depth information on the topic of business and social media, if you find this topic interesting I highly recommend taking a glance at it!
Goodbye for now!
