Is Social Media really worth bothering with?

Of course social media is (are?) at the top of the agenda for a lot of businesses.

But is this all hype or should we be taking it seriously?

Unfortunately a lot of the noise around social media marketing is enthusiastic hot air. "Everyone's doing it!", "You can get a dialogue going with all your consumers!", "It's replacing advertising!" Etcetera. Etcetera.

None of these are real reasons for investing in social media.

But there are a number of extremely strong strategic business benefits that social media can deliver. They won't all be relevant for all businesses. But the chance is that at least one or two will be relevant for your business.

Let's start with marketing. Social media can help with acquisition. At its simplest you can use social media to inform and enhance SEO and paid search campaigns. And you can also use it to contribute to advertising campaigns by seeding discussions. It's an important PR tool as well which you can use for monitoring and managing your brand's reputation. All with the aim of getting new customers.

Probably best not to be too overt about direct marketing though (unless you are talking to a group of very strong fans who want to be sold to.)

And you can use it for retention as well. Establish a dialogue with consumers and you can tell them about new products and special offers as well as identifying (and addressing) areas of unhappiness.

As part of this you can also use social media for delivering customer service where it can help retention and also deliver cost savings, by enabling your customers to help one another, and by enabling a common problem to be addressed on a one-to-many basis.

You can also use social media to affect product evolution and to guide new product development. Listen to what your consumers are saying about your products and you will have a good idea as to where your product set should be heading.

Undertake some competitor analysis using social media and you will have an even better idea about your marketplace.

Combining competitor and customer analysis will help guide investment decisons in staff, marketing and production (is your customer service up to scratch, are you wasting your advertising budget, are your products built robustly enough...)

Then there is recruitment: social media is increasingly used in this function, as a way of delivering marketplace intelligence, locating and evaluating candidates (with or without the help of recruitment agencies), and enabling candidates to find and develop positive feelings about your business. Don't forget your current staff either. Social media can powerfully develop feelings of team and increase staff morale.

And finally one should not forget The City. Social media can be used very effectively for financial PR which can positively affect share price and business stability.

The noise surrounding social media is clearly not just hype. But that doesn't mean social media campaigns are always delivered well. Far from it! But a structured and commonsense approach, combined with a willingness to experiment (and sometimes fail) will take your business a long way on the road to benefiting from these exciting new opportunities.

Jeremy Swinfen Green
Digital Director, MC&C
jeremy@mcand.co.uk