How Social Media caters to Business?

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Badoo, and Foursquare etc. are world’s largest social networking sites, where millions of users gather to make their presence felt in virtual world. Today, no youth belonging to developed and developing nations can dream life without virtual social existence, such an importance social networks has come to enjoy and hold in common life of these youth. Business leaders and organizations understand this, and want to exploit social networks to gain business advantage, hone business edge and trigger high business growth.

Traditionally, business agenda was single-mindedly focused on profit making, but after the coming of Internet age, especially in after the coming of Web 2.0, business ethics, principles and goals has drastically changed. Now profit making is not the sole goal, today, business cater to multi-cultural environment where business should be comfortable in multi-national dynamism, business should focus on offering experience to customers and build brand rather than compromise with quality to gain extra profits, and most importantly, business should be customer friendly and care for customer in every aspect. So, to achieve all these objectives, business is really working hard to decode behavioural pattern and mental process of customers, and understand customers’ desired and required needs, and also bring in never imagined and not so required services and products that may impress and become addictive just like Facebook, Apple etc.

In fast changing landscape of business, very little is known on how social media comes to play the most strategic role?

Popularly social media is known for marketing, where businesses world over, freely market their products and services, and provide better prospects for detailed and critical analysis of products and services, eventually leading to bettering business prospects.

Business organizations are tapping into marketing segment in social media by offering discounts and freebies and organizing competitions and contests on social media platforms. Customized mobile application to connect online on social platforms are also offered to higher their follow ups and fan base. The larger the fans and followers base company or organization have, the better brand image and reputation it will garner in customer’s eye.

Social media role isn’t limited to only marketing and sales, it also is progressively engaged in business intelligence, customer relationship management and business research segment of business.

Social networks over the years with large user base, have accumulated unimaginable amount of data and information, which is really mouth watering for business as this data is largely consisted of real-time customers’ conversations, comments, viral info, content and other digital prints. But handling such a vast amount of data and analyzing it, is nearly impossible for anyone, nevertheless, with the help of analytics software development applications handling, maintainability and accessibility of this data is possible.

Analytics software development applications capture, record and store data from social platforms, and then analyze, delete irrelevant data and further fragment in business intelligent reports to enable optimum, highly successful and efficient decisions.

CRM is also using social media platforms productively to provide personalized, efficient and faster response to customers, and also enhance sales. Social CRM resolve customers’ issues, problems and queries in real-time, this not just save money but also enhance brand visibility and brand image online. There are software development applications based on CRM available to buy that can help business in Social CRM.

In a way it can be said that social media caters to sales, marketing and research areas of business. However, there could be many more areas where business can collaborate with social networks and work together for the betterment of business, Internet and customers.