Are you using social media to connect with your customers?

Social Media has opened new avenues for businesses to connect with their customers. These days, it isn’t enough to have a website for your business; the customer buying journey extends to social media marketing sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. More and more people are using Twitter and Facebook for Customer Service as well. The millennials do not want to use the phone to connect to a customer service rep. They want to connect with you based on their preference, not the brands.

Here are the main reasons why social media is important in a business:

1. Learn about your customers and connect with them:

   Social Media enables a business to know its audience. A business can learn about the specific needs of its customer base. Analytics like Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics enables a business to understand major demographics and patterns of customer behaviors. It provides valuable insights that help craft effective Marketing campaigns or tweak the current ones to improve results.

   Social media helps connect on an individual level. Social media also enables businesses to target a set audience– you can read their tweets and status updates to get insights into their daily lives.

2. Find new customers:

   Searching for certain hashtags on Twitter can help you find people who are interested or search for similar products as yours. It enables a business to reach a wider audience and connect with them.

3. Improve Customer Service:

   As social media works best in real-time, it provides instant access to feedback from customers. Social media enables you to know an issue as and when it arises. Moreover, there are now many studies that show that consumers appreciate companies that respond to customer complaints.

4. Create meaningful relationships and increase market share:

   Social media helps to find influencers in a particular niche. It also enables a business to reach them in a more meaningful way. Additionally, every post you make on Social Media is an opportunity for your customers to convert. When you develop a social media community, you will have access to new customers, recent customers, and old customers, and you’ll be able to interact with all of them.

5. Establish the brand as a thought leader or as an industry expert:

   People follow a brand online because it adds value to them. It gives businesses an opportunity to educate and inform their customers about how to use the product better or present valuable industry insight that empowers a customer. It would then develop trust amongst your audience and help position you and your company as industry experts.

Social media is still a relatively new area of culture for companies. With a guide like a social media policy in place, it educates your employees and sets down the ground rules. There are many examples of employees making comments on social media such as Facebook and Twitter that have brought firms into disrepute.

Here is what a clearly defined Social media policy looks like:

1. Take the guesswork out of what is appropriate for an employee to posting about your company on their Social networks.
2. Minimize confusion about legal issues: Social media policies can also help entrepreneurs and managers avoid errors.
3. A social media policy helps in raising awareness for your brand as it helps employees to understand ways they can use social media to help achieve business goals.
4. It provides an interactive and convenient medium to share information. The millennial customer base is already using Social Media and knows its benefits, hence it is effective to reach them online where they spend most of their time inhabiting.

Social media is a fast-changing medium. There are established social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. These established social media platforms are experiencing a decline in organic reach due to commercialization of the platform or a state of content shock, where content supply is more than the content consumption capacity of the audience. It is like an eventual growth phase in the life cycle of a social media platform. But they are here to stay as they make their pay-to-play strategies clearer and improve targeting that would enable brands to reach a larger, more targeted audience.

Etech has a clearly defined Social media policy in place and has a strong presence on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Etech has designed social media campaigns that tackle business challenges, showcase Etech family’s culture and publish and distribute value-adding content and industry insights for our followers to gain from.

Etech has an ongoing Social Hiring campaign where we reach potential employees and have them apply. We also promote our Organizational culture by promoting Etech’s activities, sharing employee testimonials, and other fun activities that showcase the strength and creativity of the team.

Etech uses Twitter and LinkedIn to share industry-relevant, value-adding content that would help our audience overcome their business challenges and keep them updated about the current events in the contact center industry and leadership development areas of expertise. Etech also uses insights that are derived from the analytics of these Social media platforms to devise new campaigns that generate value for the customers and audience.

This blog was first published on LinkedIn.