Social media intelligence can sift through the cacophony of discussions about your company that occur 24/7 around the social mediaverse to identify how sentiment about your small business is trending positively or negatively, discover unexpected sentiments, and even reveal new sales opportunities.
These are the top seven reasons why your small business should implement a sagacious strategy of social media intelligence gathering right now:
1. Obtain insight on the customer - Engaging in an ongoing scrutiny of online conversations can lead the small business social media marketer to a deeper comprehension of various insights to enhance their positioning as well as the strengths and capabilities of the presence.
This perspective may include which specific products and services deserve a priority in development and implementation, and which partnerships should be pursued to optimize your customers' overall sales-based social media integration.
2. Boost the effectiveness of marketing strategy - One of the basal strategies of all marketers whether online or off is to increase the volume and frequency of any positive word of mouth references and referrals. Identifying and engaging the followers who can develop into brand evangelists and responding to the primary drivers of customer experience quality and satisfaction are of utmost importance in any social media strategy.
Social media marketers can apply this type of data to follower segmentation in order to craft custom tailored messaging and promotional approaches that really "click."
3. Defend the company's reputation - One of the great unwritten rules about participating in social media is that sooner or later your small business will get blasted for some real or imagined reason. These attacks can develop suddenly and swiftly devastate any company's online reputation.
By adopting a policy of proactively monitoring what is being said about the company and where it is under discussion can help any small business identify an initial complaint before it sparks a social media wildfire.
4. Minimize customer support expenditures - Small businesses operating any form of telephone customer service or support don't have to be told that the cost per minute can easily exceed $1! Leveraging social data to identify customer inquiries as well as complaints can allow a company to respond with alacrity and efficiency.
Support personnel can offer customer assistance in real time while taking advantage of routing features which automatically direct tasks to specific individuals, saving time on hold or in re-explaining the problem.
5. Hold down market research costs - Maintaining an adequate market research program can represent an even greater slice of your expense report than call center costs. Social data analysis can mitigate the requirements of conventional market research such as recruiting, screening and incentivizing participants while minimizing the requirement for panel studies and focus groups.
6. Provide greater customer support efficiency - Applying social data can help you identify individual customers who require assistance and respond with lightning speed. Posts that are flagged can be auto-routed to the correct representative to engage the customer with the information they require.
Social media also offers the notable benefit of searchability, so the most common question and answer pairs about your company will readily be available. This will have the effect of saving your support personnel countless instances of repeating "it's not that button, it's the other button..."
... and most importantly:
7. Make more sales - The benefits of gleaning social media intelligence go far beyond the proactive efficiencies to the critical realm of obtaining a greater sales and conversion rate. The social data gathered can easily be integrated with sales force and other CRM systems to identify customers who are ready to make a purchase.
Online shoppers are accustomed to consulting product review and ratings for pre-purchase comparisons and they also rely on recommendations from within their social clique. All of this social media activity can be captured and consolidated in order to dramatically increase sales efficiencies.
Through the analysis of social media data, small businesses might discover answers to extremely significant questions that they might not even have known they should ask. Don't wait until your competitors get a leg up on you in the social media marketing universe, start gathering that all-important data now!