Let’s start here. All businesses are social nowadays simply by existing. Whether they like it or not, people can talk about them online. This includes both customers and employees.
Putting that aside, the organization that wishes to become a successful Social Business must take actions to fully utilize the full opportunities of social media across the organization to the benefit of the customer, the employee, and the company’s objectives.
It must consider the various ways that social tools, processes, opportunities and best practices are integrated across the entire company.
A Social Business isn’t just an organization with a Twitter account and a budget for Facebook ads. A Social Business isn’t just using social tools for marketing.
Social Business: Explained
A Social Business is using social media tools for marketing externally, but also for marketing and communications internally.
A Social Business is empowering sales teams with shareable sales resources and online assets that optimize and accelerate the buyers journey.
A Social Business is using content and social ads as part of their recruiting strategy, not just blasting job postings to indeed.com or simplyhired.com.
A Social Business is using tools to collaborate and then analyzing trends in conversations and identifying influential advocates inside the company.
A Social Business is using online videos for customer support, running and engaging customers in forums or groups, and is responding to customer inquiries, compliments and criticisms publicly for everyone to see.
A Social Business is more open and transparent because it recognizes that transparency is not only a great way to build trust, but it’s also unavoidable in an era of smartphones and hyperconnectivity. Secrets are harder and harder to keep and the world is moving towards greater levels of openness.
A Social Business understands that it cannot prohibit its people from using social networks and instead tries and guides them to effective and responsible usage that both benefits the company, and the employee.
A Social Business is always listening to the customer, responding with content or conversation, using social ads to reach the right people with something valuable, and measuring results and analyzing trends across their listening campaigns, content campaigns and advertising campaigns.
Why would you want to do all of this?
Building trust with customers should naturally lead to more sales and greater loyalty. That means they are more likely to recommend you, and you can spend less to earn more.
Happier employees are typically more productive employees and they’re also likely to stay longer leading to reduced turnover.
Recruiters are expensive and they’re often taking a spray and pray approach to finding the right candidate. But when you tap into the network you already have, and utilize content and social ads, you can get better job candidates for less, with a higher likelihood of fitting the culture.
The list goes on and on.
Are you a Social Business? If you’re reading this post, chances are that you are not. But it’s easier to get started than you might think. The first step is assessing where you are. We can help. Give us a call or fill out a contact form to get a quote.