Social media platforms can improve businesses tremendously

As the landscape of the digital world changes so often, social media platforms should be giving businesses enough cannon fodder to keep thinking about how to improve their business. Let’s not consider for a moment the fact that I just heard Facebook and Google are trying to buy Twitter for an estimated $8 – $10 billion, creating a digital behemoth no one could have foreseen. The rise of such social media platforms though has caused senior business executives to assess how they stay in touch with their customers and employees. It has caused them to have a fundamental rethink of the way in which they use the media for their own benefit.

People don’t want to be sold to or talked down to any more; they want to be informed by businesses that sincerely have no self-interests at heart. That is very hard to do since for-profit businesses will always have some of their own interests in mind at all time, but those that are sincere find the little benefits emerging. Take the Old Spice series of ads, which I found very refreshing (no pun intended). The TV ads were very good indeed, but it all really took off when those ads were tailored for Youtube and Twitter and aimed at celebrities as tightly targeted messages. Similarly, people will not seek out just ads, but ads that friends are watching as well.

And that works both ways. If something has gone wrong for you as a business, you will want to cover your tracks and make everything right very quickly since people will tell everyone in their network that things aren’t cool with you. It doesn’t take much to start a wildfire in the social media and you don’t want your business to be at the center of one that ravages it. Facebook, Twitter, and the likes of it are no longer optional extras or appetizers; they’re the main course when it comes to your business’ communication needs and it should be central to your brand strategies.

Make sure all your online presences are geared not just to handle customers, but prospects and queries as well. The speed at which these queries are resolved could make a massive difference. Recently, I tried to find out why my cellular service provider wasn’t letting me get through to customer care and I ran into road blocks time and time again. It was very frustrating until I tweeted them and got the whole thing resolved in a matter of hours. I can’t begin to tell you how impressed the speediness of problem resolution impressed me. That’s what your business should aim for with these social media platforms, to not just manage and inform visitors, but amaze and delight them. That’s when you’ll hit the jackpot.