On the web, people are becoming more active and more talkative. Those people that make up your potential customers, are wandering the web on their quest to share and search.
Since social media networks came to a rise, users are just a few clicks/taps away from their favorite brands and celebrities. With the world shrinking to the size of everyone's hand, social media can be a great place for them to reach you, and for you to reach them.
Not many brands on social media are just as talkative (willing to reply) as their followers and fans. It's actually rare for them respond and tell their customers to visit their official page or contact them directly via email or telephone. The result is that, the majority of brands aren't taking the advantage of socializing with their customers in real time.
On social media, your friends may not be your "friends", but this fact shouldn't stop you from being a "friendly" brand.
Approaching Social CRM
Usually, CRM focuses on collecting and managing customers' data. This include information about purchases, contact history, demographics and more. The source of these valuable data usually come from email and phone interaction, and they're limited to direct interactions that have been made between the company and the customer.
To become a friendlier being on social media networks, you can embrace social CRM to add a deeper layer on information above your traditional CRM. The data is sourced from social networks where users are publicly sharing information.
Social CRM can help you track your customers' influence, revenue and more. The source of data isn't limited to formal and direct communication; it's everything that traditional CRM isn't.
With the data publicly available, you can combine your knowledge and your other resources of data, to meet the needs of both customers and potential customers. Social CRM also allows you to keep a full audit history of all customer interactions, regardless of the social channel they use.
Furthermore, social CRM enables you to take faster actions and give smarter responses. This is because social CRM gives you a lot more insight about each of your customers based on their social activity.
A Weapon Of Choice For Small Businesses
Small businesses tend to have more limited resources. With their lesser capabilities if compared to their larger counterparts, they need to manage their resources as efficiently as possible so they can reach their goals without too many to concern.
As a publicly available and free service, social media networks can be the secret weapon of choice for small businesses, thanks to their incredible reach and influence.
As a start, social media can play multiple role in aiding small businesses. From becoming a marketing engine to research and lead generation, social media networks thrive from their large amount of interactions. This can provide any businesses, especially smaller ones, the wealth of data to improve their services and products.
Social media can also be a great place to leverage brand awareness and business approach.
But as a smaller being on the social media universe, small businesses should put a lot more efforts in marketing their work. To ease the process, they need to show more respect to the social media networks by interacting more often.
For instance, you should reach potential customers more frequently, and never ignore complaints and negative comments.
Social Media As A Tool
An increasing number of people use social media to reach brands of their choice, rather than using email or contacting directly through phone calls. The influence of social media networks is increasing, and that is a good reason for small businesses to be active there.
Business process from marketing, sales and customer service can get have a more significant appeal by using social media as tool because it eases communication and improves profile for each customers.
With the data publicly available and their tools available for free, social media networks can be the thing that gives user-experience that represents your brand that is open to customers' needs and desires. Plus, you can react to them in a more convenient and casual way through the multiple of platforms available out there.
Through this solution, using social media networks for your business is plainly a win-win solution for everyone.
Further reading: Boosting Your Business Social Media Presence To Benefit Yourself And Your Audience