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Why is social media important for businesses?
Do businesses really need social media? if so, then why? If not, then why is this such a big trend in the online world ?
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3 Answers
Social Media for businesses is so important that we should quit referring to it as Social Media and start calling it Social Business.
Whether or not a business actively engages in Social Media they are already involved. Customers are already talking about you, they are sharing good news and quite often bad news about your company, your people, your competitors, and your product. If your business is not in the space you are missing the opportunity to shape the conversation. Businesses that do not engage in social are missing a tremendous opportunity to learn, engage, and develop relationships with their customers. Additionally, Social Business is a great way to engage/collaborate with your channel partners. Many businesses fail to understand that their channel partners are working to build out their social networks whether the provider, re-seller, or distributor of those goods chooses to participate in social or not.
I am totally in agreement with Al's comment, many marketers just don't get it. They are wired to control the message, making sure everything is formalized, and most of all they are programmed to push. Many use social as a push mechanism and fail to understand the real value of social is pull.
Social is integrated into our lives at multiple levels and businesses that choose to ignore it are probably missing a great revolution.
There are some positive and negative aspects. As a positive aspect, Facebook was intended to put a "face" on companies, and let you know who the people are and what they think. On a typical website, the "About Us" page is the second most visited page after the Home page, so think of Facebook as an extension of the About Us page.
Another positive aspect is that the company website gets inbound links from social media, which is an important SEO factor.
Now, lets look at the misuse of social media by companies. I have seen websites where the company does everything in its power to get you to LEAVE the company's website and visit Twitter, or whatever. They put prominent icons front and center of the Home page, or use huge heading level text, and so on to do this.
This is flat out wrong. Social media should be used to drive traffic TOWARDS the corporate website, not away from it. Once a visitor has landed on your company website, you can do the hoped-for conversion. That is, convert the visit into a sale, or a contact message, or whatever it is you want them to do. If you send them away to Twitter, there's a good chance they may never come back, and you have just LOST business, not GAINED it.
Bob raises some very good points.
The sad fact is, a lot of people with marketing titles actually understand very little about real marketing, and they are the ones who are always looking for the next shiny new marketing tool that promises instant success — for every marketer in the world — for free!
Al Shultz
http://www.alshultz.com
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