|
Since the industrial age, businesses have learnt to
acquire tools that bring mechanical advantage and help achieve more with
less effort. Now, the digital age has brought a lot of enterprise
applications to improve business efficiency. Social Media has further
added social productivity tools, which bring fun, ease and convenience
to business.
In this piece, we present some of the social media tools already helping
businesses worldwide become more efficient.
Businesses now use social media for more activities than just chatting
with existing customers. Moreover, different business departments now
have peculiar ways of using social media. Sales departments use social
media to get new leads, monitor the leads and close sales. Human
resource departments use social media to get new employees. Advertising
departments reach out to more customers on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn
and other social networks. Similarly, marketing and R&D departments now
mine forums, blogs, social networks and review sites to get better
understanding of their target markets.
|
|
 |
|
There are several social media tools to use. It doesn’t matter what
tools you use as long as you get the results you want to achieve.
However, it is best to focus on using tools that are easy to use, secure
and really efficient, and most importantly get tools that fit your
business requirements. Also, you should ensure the tools you finally
decide on can serve your local needs. One of the major advantages of web
applications is that even the most expensive ones usually allow trial
periods, during which you can evaluate whether a tool suits your
business needs or not. Besides, many paid applications have free
alternatives. However, it is advisable for big businesses to opt for
paid versions over the free alternatives in order to get more security
and guarantees.
The Web Has Changed Our World
The web has grown so fast and tightly woven into the normal lifestyle of
almost everybody. According to reports, the number of active users of
Facebook is already over 900 million, now pushing 1 billion; that’s
about 14% of the population of the world. Also, Twitter is expected to
hit 500 million registered users in the next few months. LinkedIn,
Pinterest, YouTube and other social platforms are growing in leaps and
bounds. Obviously, people are becoming more comfortable using online
social platforms to interact with one another.
The present generation of consumers and the next generation spend most
of their time on mobile devices and computers. They tend to find things
like chatting, texting, sending instant messages and making other short
continuous conversations more convenient than emailing or writing long
letters. They spend most of their time with laptops, netbooks,
smartphones, tablets and other new gadgets. Secondly as business
competition gets stiffer, more and more people tend to consume media
(news, entertainment etc) on their mobile devices while commuting in
order to save time. Hence, the new best place to stay connected with
team members, employees and partners is on these devices.
Therefore, you cannot continue to neglect social media and expect your
business to survive for long. No matter the size of your business,
getting involved and using social media is your sure bet towards
mastering the language of this generation and the coming generations. To
be frank, this is just the beginning of the new lifestyle of the world,
and social media is not going away any soon. So get your business to
adjust to this new culture and enjoy better business results.
|
|
|
|
Tools that Can Transform Your Business
There are several social media tools to choose from. You can’t possibly
use all the available tools for your business. The solution today is to
decide the best set of tools that can be adapted for your business based
on your business peculiarity.
Here, we shall highlight a few major social media tools based on their
relevance to your business:
Monitoring and Managing Your Brand
One way to describe the digital age is the “age of information
overload”. Consumers have access to all sorts of information, which they
use in making buying decisions. Social media tools for monitoring brands
help you track the mentions of your brand anywhere on the Internet. By
tracking where your brand is mentioned, you will be able to encourage
positive reviews and quickly tackle negative comments and also
understand your customers better.
Hootsuite
Keeping track of all your social network accounts can be very daunting.
Hootsuite is an incredible tool, in this respect, for managing multiple
Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, monitoring the mentions of your
name and replying where necessary. It also enables you to schedule
updates and get reports on the number of people that share your updates.
Similar tools you can try are SocialOomph, Sprout Social and Monitter.
Crowbooster
Crowdbooster is another tool for managing social networks and is
specifically built for businesses. It autoposts contents, monitors new
fans and followers and provides statistics about how your content is
being shared It also lets you know the fans that are most interested in
your posts and recommends the best time of the day to post updates to
enable you get the highest engagement. It also helps to remind you to
reply tweets. A similar tool is Bufferapp.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is an indispensable tool for monitoring your business
reputation online. It is a free tool from Google that works excellently
well for monitoring your brand. Every time your business is mentioned on
any website on the Internet, Google will send you an email. You can
choose to receive the emails as it happens, daily or weekly. You can
also use Google Alerts to monitor the mentions of specific products,
brand names or name of a person.
Creating a Strong Online Presence and Maintaining It
Your website and blog form the home-base and fortress of your online
presence. They are the best place to get fans to connect with your brand
more deeply. They are like the headquarters of your business, built and
furnished to your taste; whereas other social media destinations are
like outlets of your company, where you try to attract and retain more
customers. Your blog and website are always yours to fully control, but
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media destinations can be
tweaked and changed by the providers. So, get your website and blog in
order as much as you can.
WordPress
You can use WordPress to build great blogs and really powerful and
dynamic websites or both. As a small business owner, you can begin with
their free domain name and webhost and later upgrade to a personal one.
WordPress blogs are well optimized for search engines, and they
integrate excellently with social networks. That’s why WordPress powers
many of the sites you see online.
Blogger
A great alternative to WordPress is Blogger, which is a free blog
publishing service provided by Google. It lets you create blogs for one
or more people. The blogs are hosted free by Google at a sub-domain of
blogspot.com. Like WordPress blogs, Blogger blogs can be built on very
low budget.
Other alternatives for building free websites are GNBO (for Nigerians)
and Tumblr. The advantage of these platforms is that they can help you
have a website on very low budget.
Connecting on Social Networks
Though a lot of people do not know, some of the most amazing business
tools today are social networking sites. They let you find customers
based on their interests, locate partners easily and also maintain a
presence for prospecting, gaining leads and getting customers.
|
|
|
|
LinkedIn
For business connections, try and spend more time with LinkedIn, and you
will be amazed at the potentials. LinkedIn can be regarded as the best
social network for getting new leads. It is a professional social
networking site of over 161 million users. To properly harness the power
of LinkedIn for your business, you need to create a complete profile,
join relevant professional groups and participate in discussions. On
LinkedIn, you can ask business questions and get answers from experts
all over the world, or you can simply read the conversation of others to
learn practical business wisdom.
Facebook
Aside the regular chatting and messaging, you can use Facebook to create
brand pages for your business, install relevant extensions and use it to
keep your fans abreast of your business updates. You can set up a
vibrant discussion group for communicating with your partners or
customers. Having a Facebook business page is indispensable for your
business. Currently, Facebook has over 900 million active users, making
it a place you should go and spend time with your customers and not lose
them to competitors.
Twitter
Twitter is excellent for disseminating short information and keeping
track of discussion trends around the world. It is a real time
information network that connects users to latest news, stories,
opinions and ideas. It lets you send and receive text-based posts of up
to 140 characters. Twitter currently has over 140 million active users
and is pushing 500 million registered users according to Twopchart.
Google Plus
One of the best business features of Google Plus is their Hangout. It is
a free but powerful video chat service for up to 10 persons. With the
relevant extensions, you can share documents and much more while video
chatting. While ten persons can participate in the video chat, many more
people can watch the discussion.
YouTube
Today, many people share videos on social networks. This presents a
unique opportunity for your business to get new customers and engage
existing ones. By uploading short videos to YouTube and sharing with
friends, you will be taking advantage of the over 800 million unique
visits to YouTube every month from all over the world.
Reaching Out to Customers
Email still remains the most effective means of business communication
to clients. Here is an effective tool for email campaigns:
MailChimp
Currently, 1.8 million people are using MailChimp to get effective
results from email campaigns involving large number of email
subscribers. It has all the features you need to create effective email
marketing campaigns. It lets you create great designs of newsletters and
preview them before sending to your subscribers. Also before sending
your emails, MailChimp checks all your emails with Delivery Doctor to
ensure your emails will not end up in spam boxes. Additionally, it lets
you use social networking in conjunction with emails. You also get
excellent graphical reports of your subscribers’ activities – open
rates, clicked URLs and so on.
Team Collaboration
Without the possibility of collaborating, managing businesses and
executing projects would have been a nightmare. Impressively, one of the
greatest good brought by the social media is greater ease and fun in
business collaboration. Here are some tools that make collaboration on
the web very easy:
Manymoon
Manymoon is one of the best free tool available on the web for
collaborating on projects. It is a free social productivity, project
management and task management web application that lets you create as
many projects as possible, assign tasks, set milestones, and monitor
completed projects among team members. Also, members of your team can
easily update everyone on the team about the progress of their work, and
also view the projects handled by other members. A paid alternative to
Manymoon is Basecamp. It is more expensive, but it provides greater
convenience.
Yammer
Yammer is an enterprise social network. Unlike Twitter that lets you
broadcast post to the public, Yammer enables groups of people to keep
conversations private. It provides a unique and secure way for employees
to communicate, collaborate and share information. Users can share
ideas, posts, news, links and also ask and get answers to questions
within a close network. Using the basic service is free; and anyone can
start a Yammer network and begin inviting others. A paid alternative to
Yammer is Precurio, built in Nigeria by Nigerians.
Additionally, there are platforms where you can hire best talents from
different parts of the world to perform tasks that do not necessarily
require physical presence. They are called online outsourcing platforms.
The next time you need a website, mobile app, press reports and so on,
you can simply go to any of these websites, publish your request and get
job applications from people across several continents. The platforms
have different operating models; so you may have to stick with one or
two that fit your requirements. Some of them are Freelancer, oDesk,
eLance, Scriptlance and vWorker.
Final Tip
Don’t allow the competition come crashing on you. Social media tools
have been tried and tested to greatly improve results. Moreover, social
media tools enable you to properly monitor and analyze your business
efforts more easily. Even if your business is large already, these tools
will greatly improve your business. |