Social Business: Analysis – Part 2A: Reasons To Participate In Social Business: Marketing

The Fundamentals series continues the analysis phase with a mini-series on assessing the value and effectiveness of social business. This mini-series will cover the following aspects:

• Reasons to participate in social business
• Internal considerations
• Debunking myths
• Social business in B2B environments

I’ve divided the reasons to participate in social business into three categories:

1. Marketing
2. Reach & Community
3. Internal reasons & Reasons to avoid social business

Today, we’ll look at prevalent marketing-related reasons to participate in social business.

• Brand Management As covered in part 1 about Base-Lining, we already noticed that the social web is an excellent place for evaluating your brand. It gives you insight on the people’s knowledge and sentiment about you, plus it allows you to identify advocates as well as detractors. This gives you the opportunity to organize your marketing efforts around your findings. You can keep a close eye on what detractors are saying and respond appropriately, while driving people to the places where your brand’s advocates hang out. The latter can help you spread positive mentions to more people which will cause negative comments to be outweighed.
• Brand Awareness Through the information gathered in Part 1, you’re able to identify key platforms and tools to target prospective customers and generate targeted brand awareness.
• Reputation Building By having found the right people and the right channels, you can work to build trust and a reputation by showing your subject matter expertise. In addition, it is an opportunity to land PR opportunities in the form of interviews, videos and podcasts for instance.
• Search Engine Optimization Through the distributive nature of social media, you can generate links back to your websites or profiles when people mention your brand with a link. The effect of this will depend on the quality of the blogs/websites linking back to you (as judged by various search engines’ algorithms) but when you focus efforts on blogs/websites that have a high authority ranking and share a high degree of relevance to your brand.
• Connecting with Customers Social media offers you alternative ways to follow up with prospective customers. Say you meet someone at a conference and would like to follow up with that person. Instead of sending an email or calling that person, you could send a LinkedIn invitation and/or follow that person on Twitter. Aside from following up on the conference, these tools also allow you to get to know that person better. Once someone’s a customer, social media also offers great ways for you to stay top of mind with that person by providing high-value content from which they can directly benefit or from which you can up-sell or cross-sell at some point. Engaging with your customers on the topics they talk about give you new ways of opening up conversations that are valuable to both them and you. Finally, you can follow up on positive mentions by asking for referrals that generate more business for you.

If you have more great marketing-related reasons for getting into social business, let me hear them in the comments. Next week, we’ll look at reasons related to reach and community.