Social Networking Tools For Enterprises

Compiled By: Meet Garvalia,PG Student, KBSCMR

Insights of Social Media:

Should enterprises need Social Media ?Why should enterprises go social ? Can enterprises benefit from Social Media ? What tools are beneficial ? How ? Could anything have turned out true? How & Which Social Media to use for Advertising ? Why ? Can Social Media drive new business ? How can Social Media increase Sales & Revenue ?

Social Media: On the verge of Enterprise

Now, Everything is moving Faster. Therefore there should be need of Quick business decisions, Better & Effective communication, Improved knowledge, Sharing of experience, Open & Immediate solutions.

Enterprises becoming more agile in order to compete. Day to day business decisions & information processing should be self-organized by individual teams and it need to be empowered to execute.

It is comfortable to see Social media as –effective communication channel- a place where people/team/organization have to engage on individual’s terms, listen & interact. Openness & direct communication in enterprise enables people to apply common sense to establish agile & self-organization.

Social Media Involvement:

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41% of world’s online population, that’s about 530 million users are in Asia. There are 206.2 million internet users are in the US. More than 450 million across APAC have participated on Social media.

Social Media has reached mass maturity. More than 80% involved in India.

Real Time Involvement & average hours spent: Industry & Young people

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What consumers say about product on Social Media?

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Changing consumer focus from creation to sharing

Social Media Tools:

Skype It is an effective tool to save time to travel to a meeting. You can participate in one right from the comfort of your own desk. It comes at no cost & provide convenient & instant messaging-to the table.Easy to use & provide greater flexibility.Benefit: Easy, convenient & instant.Google Docs:Is agile, cheap, and functional tool to process with. Of course google tools are buggy, and still not as smooth, but they are simple, they focus on collaboration and they are web based.Benefits: Simple, cheap, focused on collaboration and web-based.

Blogs Share insights about company, discuss high level plans of company, to create a good reputation, can engage the audience, can drive talent . It should be used as per company products & their image building.Benefits: Marketing, PR, user feedback, image building, and recruiting.

Wikis Know-how & sharing of knowledge. It can replace corporate intranets, bringing fresh, read/write character and spirit. By enabling employees to contribute to wikis, companies establish a self-checking, self-organizing method of documenting processes and facts about the business. As an example, a typical problem in the enterprise is the transfer of knowledge. When an old employee leaves, information is often lost to his or her replacement. Wikis are much less prone to errors than static Word documents, because they are out there in the open, and people can fix them.Benefits: Self-organizing documentation for business know-how.

LinkedInConnecting the right people with the right expertise or information is what LinkedIn is designed to do .While we've often talked about Linkedin and Facebook as competing networks for enterprise collaboration, they can also be seen as complementary.

If Facebook is the place where work groups keep tabs on each other as they mingle with the rest of the Internet and its endless sea of information, LinkedIn is where they are born. but, for many, the platform still lacks the social chops expected in today's online environment. As more of a handy starting point, company newcomers are likely to feel more comfortable in discovering their productivity niches within a space primarily designed for that purpose. 

100% of Fortune 500 companies have executives using LinkedIn. 50% of LinkedIn’s users are decision makers in their companies. 41% of people using LinkedIn for marketing have generated business with it.Benefit: Connecting to right people & expertise, jobs listing & talent search, marketing.

TwitterFree solution that tons of people are already using, meaning the barrier for adoption is fairly low. Twitter’s ability to pull in important information from the outside world remains unchallenged.

Having a team of people on the platform would mean being able to track what's being said about your organization, as well as see how your colleagues are responding to consumers.  

The wealth of information that can be potential for inspiring or informing projects. Noting that 55% of these Twitter users share links to news stories, with one in eight doing this at least once per day. 53% retweet material posted by others, while 52% send direct messages to other users.

Twitter use in America: 8% of all Internet users are on Twitter, but the group is skewed more toward women (10%) than men (75), the young (18-29 year olds are most heavily represented) and urban. 62% of respondents said they post updates related to their work life, activities or interests, with 12% doing so on a daily basis.

According to MarketingProfs, 60% of Fortune 500 companies now maintain an active Twitter account, up from 35% a year ago. Meanwhile, 56% of those enterprises have a Facebook profile.

Facebook and Twitter are probably the two most-used social media sites for businesses, and building a presence on those sites is imperative. Not only you use it as another form of advertising, but you can talk directly with customers. This makes your business seem more open and accessible, and it allows to you to receive direct feedback regarding your business (if customers are saying bad things about you, you'll know and have a chance to respond).A fan page is a page or site within Facebook that promotes a company or product. Creating a fan page means that you, as the page's owner, will be able to post status updates, photos, videos, and links on the site's "wall."

Ads on Facebook

Promoting Business with Social Media Services:

Social Media to Increase Revenue:Marketing: Increase the awareness and cachet of your brand so that more people want to do business with you.

Traffic: Drive traffic to your on- and offline point-of-sales so that you sell more.

Consistency: Social Media provides a fast, easy and inexpensive way to achieve the level of contacts required to break through the inertia level. A good ratio to aim for is between 80% and 90% social content with the balance supporting direct sales content.

Loyalty: Increase your customers' commitment to your brand, products and services so that they buy more often or in larger volume.

Reviews: Include customer reviews of your products and services.  These reviews can be on your own Social Media network as well as on other venues such as Google Places, Yelp and a number of other high-authority review sites. People trust 3rd party endorsements more than they trust direct promotion.

Innovation: Use social media to add value to your existing products or services, create new offerings, or sell more effectively, so that you can sell at a higher price and/or higher volume.

Make sure there’s a connection from your Social Media presence to your sales presence: For instance, your Facebook Page can incorporate it’s own sales area or a link to your sales page on your site.  Your Twitter profile should include a link to your primary sales url.

Some Examples

There are plenty of Tools available like You Tube- Video broadcasting, Flicker-sharing images, Groupon-best deals, Four Square- Location based social media, Microsoft Advertising, My Space, for project management Microsoft projects, Basecamp from 37Signals.

Some successful examples of the Social Media Campaigns:

Gap teamed up with popular group-buying site Groupon to offer a nation-wide deal: $50 worth of apparel for just $25. By the end of the day, 441,000 groupons were sold bringing in a little more than $11 million.

Toy Story 3: Pixar and Disney let out a barrage of videos, tie-ins, and ads to promote Toy Story 3. Aside from traditional banner ads and billboards, Disney created viral videos including fake, vintage-style ads featuring the new characters, an iAd featured on the iPhone 4, and a Facebook Page complete with a built-in ticket-buying app.

Starbucks: has been busy with a bunch of successful social media campaigns across a range of networks. The coffee giant offered mayorship deals on Foursquare free goodies for Tax Day via Twitter‘s then-new promoted tweets, and a free pastry day promoted through Twitter and Facebook.

Survey

According to Social Media Marketing Report, that post highlighted the benefits of using social media platforms:

- 72 percent of respondents said social media Increases website traffic- Improved Search Rankings – (62%)- New Partnerships – (59%)- Better Sales – (48%)- Reduction in Marketing Costs – (59% for self-employed, 58% for small businesses)- Respondents were twice as likely to increase leads using social media

References:

- social media today- cms wire- Mashable- Merchant circle- MarketingProfs- ComScore- Tech Crunch- Social Signal- ROI Research Inc.- globalwebindex- Read Write Web

Thank You !

meet.garvalia@yahoo.co.in

www.essindia.com

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