Social media and Business Communication and Advertising - Essay Example

Social media and Business Communication and Advertising Executive summary The study has shown a many issues that are important t modern business with regard to business strategy. The study established that while social media plays a major role in modern business, many firms are still struggling with the problems of how to use the social media as part of their business and corporate strategy. It was clear that those firms that are able to have a well-planned social media strategy are the ones who are best able to benefit from social media. It is also clear that there is a disconnection between the executive managers and the social media strategy in most big firms. As was clear in the study, the younger people are likely to be the ones who champion the use of social media as part of the business communications strategy in a firm. However, these young people are not likely to get the support they need and in then, this means that the firm may not have a good way to access the social media resource to make their market communication better. The study also showed that there is an issue with most firms having an issue with being overwhelming factor of the social media traffic and they in most cases fail to know how to deal with it. However, this was associated with the lack of a proper social media plan and strategy in a firm. Introduction Social media has become a major part of business promotion strategy. The trend in marketing and advertising is moving towards social media. Business marketing and promotion is moving from the traditional media such as television and print media. The social media offers businesses, big and small, a range of advantages that can be useful for the purposes of ensuring that the business benefits the most from its investment is marketing and promotion investments. Social media offers the business a range of services that are useful in business and brand promotion. To begin with, it can be useful as a way to give the customers a personalized communication platform. Businesses can responds to customers’ requests, queries and communication on a one-on-one basis and this can be very useful in creating customer satisfaction. In this regard, social media offers a way for the business to be able to communicate on a personal level with the customers. However, being able to take advantage of the social media platform is not an easy fit for the businesses. Only those businesses that are able to come up with a well-laid social media strategy are able to benefit the most from the social media platform. In this case, businesses must be able to know how to take advantage of the social media to be able to take home the benefits. In fact, businesses that are unable or that refuse to take advantage of the social media end up suffering. Having a social media therefore in this regard is not just having a couple of social media accounts, but it is about knowing how to use these accounts to drive the brand ahead of the competition. Literature review Social media has elicited much interest in the scholarly arena where many scholars have been able to carry out research in the issue. Interesting themes continue coming up and many more are will come up as time goes on. This is because social media is a relatively new phenomena and it is still growing, and very fast. However, the available research in social media has indicated certain issues that are necessary for any business manager, and especially those involved in business marketing and promotion should be able to know. According to Evans (2010), social media is an ideal way for any business to create a customer service experience. This is because most people these days use their social media platforms to express themselves. Customers are likely to express their interest and their worries about a brand on social media. This as Schaffe (2013) says, will happen regardless of what the affected business has any social media accounts. Businesses that take advantage of this new phenomenon to interact with the customers through the online platform using social media are most able to make sure that they create good relationships with the customers as opposed to letting their brands to be severed by the social media. A business may need to try to respond to customers as they express their issues on social media platforms. Many customers may not prefer to call the firm’s call center for support. In this case, they are likely to go to social media ad express their concerns. The firm should seek to responds to the customers concerns in order to make sure that the customers are happy ad that the brand for the firm not ebbing severed. Businesses that understand the power of social media and the place it has in the modern business marketing and promotion create a whole unit that deals with social media issues. Just like the concept of the call centre or the support centre came about a few decades ago when firms related the need to have call centers where customers can call and express their concerns, the social media centre is a staple for any business today. It offers the firm a way to make sure that the customers are happy and well served (Barker et al, 2012). However,, with this, a number of challenges are bound to come. For instance, the firm may not be able to respond to each and every customer on social media. The firm must therefore be able to have a strategy that will help it respond to e most importance social media communications in order to make sure that it is able to respond to customer concerns. This as Evans (2010) says, can be a bog challenge to the firm and being able to sift through the social media communications from the customers, such as tweets, face book comments, instagram comments and others is a challenge that the busies should be able to take up in a serious way. To deal with this challenge, many business are realizing the need to employ social media strategists for the firm. This is the new career in the business works and the biggest challenge and as Gunelius (2010) says is the fact that there are training offered in colleges and universities to prepare these social media strategists. Because of this, firms may have a hard time when recruiting a social media strategist and this can be a challenge t the way the business is able to have a good social media strategy. A social media strategist is not just any person who is very active in the social media. However, such a person must be able to know the dynamics of the social media. They should also understand how it relates to the business strategy. In this regard, such a person must be able to understand the dynamics of the business marketing and promotion. They should also know how the business could do this online. According to Bodnar and Cohen (2011), the social media strategy plays a major role in today’s business and must not be taken in a light way. As Evans (2010) says, apart from having a social media strategy, the firm needs to employ social media customer-service personnel. They should handle the social media issues as they come in. Just like busses have been employing the call centre agents and training them on the product of the firm so that they can respond to customer requests eh social media personnel should also be trained on the project of the firm in order to help them to be able to react to consumer requests and queries. Results discussions It is very clear that firms are using social media as a way to make sure that they are able to reach the market. Over the last five years, social media marketing has increased by over a hundred percent. This is an indication that the social media platform as a strategy for business communication continues to grow. The increase in social media marketing has improved in two major ways. To begin with, the number of businesses that is using social media as their central strategy for market communication has increased. Additionally, the same time, those firms that were already using social media marketing have increased their social media marketing by adverting more often and also by increasing their social media marketing budgets. The results show that the number of firms that are using social media are now more serious with the social media as a source of strategic advantage. Social media is useful for both market communication and advertisements campaigns. However, many issues have come up with regard to social media as was in the study results. These are as follows; Lack of statistics Most firms have identified that the biggest challenge with using social media is that they are not able to know the impact on their social media activities. The problem with this is that the statistics are not clear to them and they are not able to account for their return on investment when they invest on social media adverting. For instance, social media platforms such as facebook.com promise their advertisers that they have millions of people who use their platform, and that advertisers who advertise on the network are able to reach of these millions of users. However, the truth is that not all the users on facebook.com ever see all the advertisements that are placed on facebook.com. However, the tradeoff for this is that for those users who see the advertisements, the advertisements are more likely to be most relevant to them because the social media platforms use the personal data they have about heir users to determine which advertisements are relevant to the individual users. However, firms that are new to social media marketing are not likely to see the advantage of this laser marketing offered by social media and are likely to be more comfortable with the traditional marketing channels such television. With television, these firms are able to estimate with a high level of accuracy the number of people who will see their advertisements. However, the issue with this is that while an advertisement on the television is likely to reach very many people, the advertisement may not be relevant to most of these people and this makes it harder also to have an accurate evaluation of the return on investment. The problem in this case then is a matter of the fact that social media is a very new platform and many firms are not used to it and are critical about the efficacy of the social media platform as a way of market communication as well as advertisement. Results however indicate there is an increase in the number of firms that prefer to use social media marketing. This is because of the individualized nature of the platform. In fact, a great number of firms identified that most firms do not see the social media as an advertising platform but mostly as a way to engage the customers with useful discussion that will make the customer to remain loyal and satisfied with the series or the products of the firm. These firms are most likely to use social media in parallel to the traditional advertisement platforms because they still regard the traditional advertisement as the major way to advertise and do promotions while they consider social media as a way to engage the customer in an informal way. Social media strategy The other main problem that came up is the fact that for most firms, they have a misunderstanding of what social media storage would be. A greater percentage of the firms that are using social media either do not have a social media strategy and do not seem to think it is necessary to have one or they have a very poorly developed social media strategy. This then acts as a hindrance for the firms to be able to benefit completely form social media as a way to relate to the market. Better stats tools Increased tools by social media providers such as facebook.com and Google, which allow the users to understand how their social media activity is influencing the market. Most social media platforms such as facebook.com are providing detailed tools to help advertisers to be able to know how their social media activity is influencing their business. These tools are available for both paid advertisement and free advertisements such as posts on the facebook.com network. The statistics include the reach, which refers to the number of people who are able to see any update or post that the firm posts on its social media account and the number of people who clicked on the posts. These stats tools are useful in determining the effectiveness of social media activity, especially the paid advertisements. However, most firms do not use these stats because either they are not aware of their existence or they are not able to understand the meaning of these stats. For example, most firms are not able to know what the facebook.com stats refer to such as the “reach” which refers to the number of people who were able to see the post on the social media. The biggest benefit that most firms have identified for using the social media is the fact that it is a more feasible way to engage their customers in a way that is more personal and to have relationships with the customers. More firms are appreciating the necessity of having these prelateships with the customer with regard to the fact that these relationships are likely to increase customer satisfaction. The interactions with customers on social media are also useful in increasing the loyalty of the customers due to the personal bonds that emerge between the customer and the firms. The results indicated that there is a link between the level of customer engagement on social media and customer satisfaction. However, many firms seem to be grappling with this issue. They are still trying to learn how to have meaningful interactions with the customers on the social media platforms. The results also indicate that the biggest challenge that the firms that are using social media to engage the customers is that they are overwhelmed by social media traffic because they are not able to respond to every customer who reach out to them on social media. The social media offers a good way to interact with the customers. However, it is also clear that they the social media platforms can also be a challenge to firms because their inability to responds to every customer can lead to some customers not getting satisfaction from the firm’s services and this has a fundamental impact on the firm. In fact, most firms are afraid of the social media for this very reason. Conflict between manager sand social media enthusiasts The other thing that came out was the fact that in most firms, the mangers are not the champions of social media and that this has a fundamental impact on the firm. Managers are the ones who are at the controlling positions and can determine how a firm is able to benefit from the social media. They are the ones who make the executive decisions such as whether the firm should develop a comprehensive social media strategy and how much the firm should invest in the social media. These managers are likely to be the older people who are not well familiar with the social media and so they do not appreciate it as much as the young people in the firm. In most cases, the younger people do the championing for the use of social media. They are either not in management or executive positions or they are in the lower management levels where they cannot make or influence executive decisions. Their ideas and opinions are not likely to have executive powers that are with the top managers and this then hinders the way a firm is able to take advantage of the social media platforms. Conclusions and recommendations It is very clear that the social media is gaining more prominence in business marketing and communication. Social media is a new idea whose time is here and cannot be ignored by any firm that wants to be successful in the long term. Social media is like the arrival of TV in the mid 20th century, which came to replace the print media. The need for firms to take up social media in a serious way and consider is as a critical success factor is imminent. The important factor to consider is the fact that social media come at a time when the market environment requires businesses to improve the way they communicate with the customer. This new paradigm in the market where the businesses are supposed to cater about the way the customer experienced its products is called the experience economy. The social media platform is a formidable platform that can aid the businesses to achieve this by communicating to customers directly through social media. However, as simple as it may seem in paper, acquiring social media as the major strategy for firms especially the big firms is a challenge that firms must take seriously. This requires these firms to come up with ways to ensure that they have a solid social media strategy that will help them to take advantage of the social media. It is also clear that firms are going to feel the effect of social media either positively or negatively. The wise thing to do for these firms is to make sure that they have a social media strategy that will make it possible for them to benefit and not suffer from social media euphoria. Firms can benefit a lot by having a rigorous process to develop a social media strategy that will be in line with its corporate and business strategy. Bibliography Barker, B. e. (2012). Social Media Marketing: A Strategic Approach. London, UK: Cengage Learning. Bodnar, K., & Cohen, L. (2011). The B2B Social Media Book: Become a Marketing Superstar by Generating Leads with Blogging, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Email, and More. Hoboken, NY: John Wiley & Sons. Evans, L. (2010). Social Media Marketing: Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social MediaSocial Media Marketing: Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media. New York, NY: Que. Gunelius, S. (2010). 30-Minute Social Media Marketing: Step-by-step Techniques to Spread the Word About Your Business. New York, NY: McGraw Hill Professional. Schaffe, N. (2013). Maximize Your Social: A One-Stop Guide to Building a Social Media Strategy for Marketing and Business Success. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Read More