It is indeed very exiting to see businesses adopting socialmedia for keeping in touch with customers and getting new customers through the social web. Social media is one of the most powerful tool for business now. But sadly most of the businesses don't get good results from it.
Simply adding twitter and facebook buttons to a website does not mean utilisation of social media. Tweeting to people to ask them to visit your webiste or trying to 'advertise' your business in your tweets only results in apathy or loss of followers. This is considered to be equivalent to spam in social networks. Social media presence which is not handled professionally or not strategized always results in wastage of time and money.
To get good results from a social media, you need a good social media campaign which is crafted professionally to reflect your brand, the brand philosophy and the brand personality. Remember, there are real people behind those facebook and twitter profiles and they would like to Interact with real people on the social web and not 'advertisements'. Social media campaigns are all about word of mouth publicity on the web. So, to succeed here you need to generate content and conversations which can result in generation of word of mouth. The content/ conversations should be so exiting/ useful/ personal, that the people recieving it should be tempted to share or forward it to other people following them. This is why social media can be virally effective in popularizing you, at times.
Apart from marketing, social media is also good for customer care purposes as you can stay in touch with your customers and also keep a track of their conversations.
You need a Social media agency which
* understands the psychology of the social web and your customers
* understands the character of your brand
* reflects your brand in the social web- right from a well designed profile to engaging conversations and solid content creation and sharing on the web
* continuosly manages your social media platforms
* stimulates lead generation
Remember, words spread faster on the social web. If your are not having a professionally managed social media strategy, your competitors may go ahead faster than you to catch up with your customers. In today's world of the internet, you cannot afford to waste time and efforts and need to react immedietly to the changing times. A well managed social media strategy is the need of the hour for your business now.
