10 Ways That Social Media Can Benefit Your Business Marketing?

What is Typical Company Policy on Social Media.

A recent survey of CIO’s in the U.S. market by Robert Half Technology, found that 54% of company’s surveyed do not allow employees to visit social networking sites while at work.

Essentially an individual company’s policy on social networking comes down to what goals they have for social media use.

It would appear that most forms have no policy or are still trying to get their heads around whether social media has any relevance for Business Marketing.

What About Consumer Behaviour?

Razorfish has just released its latest annual study into consumer behaviour online.

The study revealed that Social media impacts 65 percent of online consumers buying opinions.

The Scale of Social Media

This is quite staggering – here are just a few facts to underline the immense scale of social media activity:

• It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million people, yet Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months (It currently has around 300m users)
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth largest country in the world.
• YouTube has over 100m users
• Linked, the business networking site has over 40m business users.

So it is clear that companies need to start taking Social Media Seriously and to develop a set of goals for using social media to their benefit.

How can You Categorise Social Media?

There are many types of social media. In order to understand how they can be used to achieve business goals it is worth while thinking about how they can be categorised.

Here is a categorisation that was developed by Social Media Science.

Social media comes in many forms. Each of these indicates something about the specific needs they were designed to meet. All of this information is critical when developing business goals social media.

You see some of these differences in the Social Media Types List below:

Social Networking:

• MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Ning, LinkedIn

Social News:

• ReadIt, Propeller, Fark,

Wikis:

• Wikipedia

Social Bookmarking:

• Digg, Delicious

Blogs:

• Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad,

Video Sharing:

• YouTube, Hulu

Photosharing:

• Flickr, Photobucket

Presentation Sharing:

• Slideshare.net, Issuu, Scribd,

My 10 Goals For Social Media In Business

Every business will be different but for now my company has set the following goals for Social Media:

1. To increase brand awareness and name recognition for the company and its main service lines
2. To earn respect and enhance our reputation within our industry.
3. To drive traffic to our website
4. To make new business contacts
5. To promote our business services
6. To keep customers informed
7. To get to know customers better
8. To provide customer service and support
9. To recruit new staff
10. To keep up with competitors.

If you agree that social media can contribute to these business goals then you had better start implementing a serious social media marketing plan for your business.

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