Keeping Up or Moving Ahead?

As you now know......I’ve been telling you for weeks now.......businesses are tapping in to social media to engage with customers.   

The use of the various types of social media applications is increasing at a huge rate, which is great, but how can businesses find out what they’re gaining from it?  It’s not all about playing about with the look of their social networking page and tweeting it’s about sales figures and satisfaction levels.  

There are lots of examples of companies that use social media so they should be measuring the benefits somehow right?  Well believe it or not .......not all of them do.  I find it strange that all businesses that use social media don’t measure what it costs or gains them.  Businesses are all about making money so surely it’s important to know if social media is worth all the hassle.  Why are they using social media if not to make money?  For some of them is it to keep up with the Jones’s?  Come on!  You need to catch up and measure what social media brings to the table!  

So what kind of things should businesses measure?  Well they could get a figure for increased communication with customers through email, comments on pages, etc and see if they could prove that this has increased sales.  If you have an advertising campaign you would measure the sales so surely social media activity should be treated the same?  

Increased employee collaboration through wikis could generate more ideas for products than traditional meetings.  Brainstorming events are not what they used to be.  Being able to colloborate with colleagues through social media takes the pain out of being forced to come up with an idea instantly. 

Money could be saved on training as social media tools are easy to use or they could measure the cost saving on not needing software at all.   

You should all know by now that Google Docs is free! 

But it’s not all about benefits as there are costs involved too.  New hardware with better network connections is clearly a cost.  Installation and maintenance of equipment is not cheap but you could argue that any equipment they use will cost them money to maintain.  You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs.  

So maybe we should be asking why do businesses decide they want to use social media in the first place?  What do they want to achieve?  And how will they know when they’ve done it?  

So if they’re not just keeping up with the Jones’s then they need to define how they can use social media effectively.  Believe it or not there are frameworks they can use.  It’s serious business!  

Businesses use a framework to try and get more people involved with the company as they can learn from the conversations their customers have.  They can see who’s talking about them.  They want influential people to talk about them possibly bloggers or people with large amounts of “friends” and the whole point of this is that they’ll try and use this to get you, the customer, to go to their website to buy their products.  It’s like stalking in reverse!

Different analytical tools are available for businesses to measure their social media.  Facebook has “insights” that show amongst other things who’s looked at the page, where they are geographically, what else they like and who their friends are.  People who use Facebook are forever trying to find out who’s looked at their profile.   Why do you want to know who’s looked at your page?  Because it lets you know that people find you interesting?  Because it makes you feel as if you’re being heard?  Or because you’re just too nosey?    

Businesses get to see who’s been looking at their page so they can see who their message is getting to and the amount of times they’re mentioned.  They can see who’s talking about them.  Jealous aren’t you?  

Why should businesses use this information?  

So they can see what the topics of conversation are and the sentiments.  If they’re good they can keep doing what they’re doing and if they’re bad they can step in and counteract them.  Is it just me or is this not something that should be central to the social media usage for businesses?  

Businesses need to know if customers are going to the company website from social media leads and possibly more importantly are the people from social media leads buying anything?  

If they’re not is there really any point in using social media? 

The figures involved in social media are impressive so instead of me you boring you with them, check out this video and be prepared to be astounded.