Does your Company Need Social Media? It needs a Strategy First.

Social media may harm your business with viral negative comments or increase business exposure, increase web traffic, and improve search ranking. These advantages can be not achieved without a strategy. Social Media Marketing Industry Report said that 78% of marketers saw an increased in traffic with just six hours a week invested in social media.

Benefits

By implementing a social media strategy, the rest of the organization will benefit while also it will improve its effectiveness and allocation of resources as well. Some of the benefits of having a social media strategy are:

•           Company’s trustworthiness will increase; better branding synergy is produced.
•           Web traffic of targeted audience will increase:

o   Provides a higher conversion rate; therefore the company will have a better ROI.

o   Company will be able to listen and interact with its target audience, while decreasing its R&D expenses. Companies will have better insight about their customers, which in turn can help it to understand customers in a better way.

•  Higher probability of having a relationship with customers. This increase engagement, willingness to pay and therefore improves bottom line.

Social media is a powerful tool but it has to be well planned, developed, implemented and integrated with the other business area of the company. Companies must be sure that they are expressing their company’s and brand’s visions, and not only starting using Social Medias as advertising channels, but as an additional tool to increase awareness, enhance relationship, and increase engagement. Some companies start creating accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest and think they have social media presence because they have a lot of “followers” or “friends”. However, companies don’t realize that they may be harming their businesses. Without a strategy the company may not be able to monitor what people are saying and/or may not be able to react to viral negative messages and can give contradictory messages to their clients.

What are you waiting for? Stop harming your business and talk to your employees as soon as possible about the company’s and social media strategies. In case you don’t know how to implement your strategy, here are 3 Steps to Effective Media Strategy: http://bit.ly/K9ABOo.

Paula Fuentealba is a graduate student in the Northwestern Medill IMC program and is specializing in digital marketing and e-commerce. Paula will be graduating in December 2012. Paula can be reached on twitter using the handle @PaulaIMC.