Although social media was initially designed for more personal use, giving individuals multiple ways of staying connected with their friends and family, now businesses have caught on and are starting to use it to market their goods and services, provide new customer service outlets, and engage more directly with their customers than ever before. Therefore, social media has a great impact on business processes because it is becoming the main way for the business to understand who the customer is and what the buying habits of a customer look like.
The Social Business
According to a study by McKinsey.com, more than 40% of the businesses that were surveyed claimed to have already deployed social networks and blogging as part of their content marketing. Through the use of social networking, video sharing, blogs, and microblogging, companies have the resources to create and implement powerful marketing campaigns to reach their target consumers. But what about the business side of things? How have these technologies impacted internal business processes?
In the same study, the survey also revealed that organizations that utilize these social technologies for internal purposes experienced improved customer relationships. Social media has drastically shifted the way we connect to exchange expertise with one another. Moving beyond Facebook fan pages and custom Twitter accounts, businesses are starting to incorporate these social tools in several ways, from everyday business decisions to sales to product development, the “social businesses” of today have more resources than ever to listen to their customers, encourage engagement, discover new market opportunities, as well as create a stronger, more effective workforce.
Maintaining one of the most impressive social networking profiles, IBM has been able to attain one of the largest corporate-wide social media communities. They are able to do this by allowing every IBMer to have access to a variety of their internal information sources, including blogs, instant messaging, wikis, and communities. As a result, the organization is able to do much more than develop new products and services. Using these social technologies internally, IBM gives their sellers a way to better connect with clients as well as for training purposes, building awareness among clients, influencers, and communities along the way.
For Your Benefit
Since adopting social technologies, businesses have noticed three results that directly benefited their internal processes:
- Increasing speed to access knowledge
- Reducing communication costs, and
- Increasing speed to access internal expertise
In an environment where businesses are now saving money and moving their processes a lot faster, social technologies tend to serve two very important needs of companies. Since many internal processes can be performed at a much faster pace, businesses can focus more on other priorities, such as research and development to create better quality products and services.
There were also three results that made the relationships between businesses and customers easier:
- Increasing effectiveness of marketing
- Increasing customers satisfaction, and
- Reducing marketing costs
Businesses have become more transparent thanks to social technologies—consumers can now write reviews of their experiences with companies online and share it with millions of other potential customers. Not only does the Internet give customers another outlet to express their needs and concerns, but it has also placed a lot more pressure on businesses to maintain their customers’ satisfaction. Marketing via the Internet is much cheaper than the more traditional markets of print, radio and television, so a business can also cut costs that way and increase their profitability.
Business partners, suppliers, and external experts such as consultants have also benefited from the adaptation of social technologies, including:
- Increasing speed to access knowledge
- Reducing communication costs, and
- Increasing speed to access external experts/consultants
One of the main technologies that has given these benefits is Voice-over Internet protocol (VoIP), which is used by Skype and Google Hangout—two free services that can be used to facilitate meetings and interviews, which can replace expensive and outdated legacy phone systems. The ease of use of this software can facilitate collaboration with your business partners, consultants and suppliers no matter where they are.
What Lies Ahead
Although the adaptation of social technologies to ease business processes is something businesses are doing more and more, there are still a few challenges ahead. For example,a revised Facebook algorithm determines which content makes it to the top of the news feed and which content doesn’t. If you have 100,000 likes on your Facebook page, only 10,000 might see your posts—that’s a reach of only 10% at best! Even though you might have a strong social media presence, there is really no choice but to consider the option for promoted posts so that all your fans can see what your company is up to.
Adaptation to social technology is beneficial to your business because it can cut costs and create goodwill with your current customers, and even attract some new ones. In addition, your business processes will be more streamlined and you can use the time (and money) that you used to spend worrying about how to reach out to and communicate to customers and business partners and use it on other areas of your business that need improvement as well.
