Business Applications Of Social Media Inside Organizations: An Overview
September 23rd, 2009Is social media good for business? How do organizations use social media to improve their marketing effectiveness and boost their sales?
Photo credit: Stephen VanHorn
Social media is making strong inroads in the business world, but understanding how to leverage social media properly remains one of the greatest marketing challenges to overcome.
While there is no secret formula with which your business can benefit from social media, there are a number of facts that do point clearly at the increasing relevance of using social media to improve their business opportunities:
- The use of social media is growing rapidly. eMarketer predicts that in just four years more than 50% of Internet users are going to be regular social media visitors.
- Traditional marketing channels have become tricky venues to promote your product. Consumers are suspicious of marketing and relationships created ad hoc to sell a product do not work anymore.
- Social media is focused on engagement, community and authority. Your marketing approach in the attention economy, should be to create a community of loyal visitors and “evangelists” for your brand, willingly spreading the word about what you do.
- Social media is emerging as a reliable indicator of online advertising performances.
“OK” - you may say now - “I am starting to understand the value of social media for my business, but what type of social media should my company use?”
Linkedin and Facebook seem now the preferred venues for businessmen, while blogs are the most popular form of social media that organizations are starting to use.
How do I know all this?
Josh Gordon, marketing consultant and president of Selling 2.0, has prepared an extremely useful social media report providing interesting insight about the use and adoption of social media inside the business and corporate world.
Part one of this report provides an overview on how much organizations are familiar with social media and why their usage is predicted to grow exponentially in the next few years.
Here all the details:
