How Social Media and Communication Tools Can Help Your Business
Effective information management is the key to successful business development. One of the main conditions for effective information management is the use of modern business communication tools.
New business conditions require organisations to use new methods and business tools that will bring business communication to a fairly high level. For success in business, it is necessary to actively communicate with partners and clients, to establish new connections, including international ones. And in this case, it is practically impossible to do it without social media and good communication in the company.
How to use communication tools and social media, and how can they help your business? Let’s figure it out.
Why does a business need social networks?
By creating an account on social networks for your company or for your product, you can work to increase brand awareness, directly communicate with your target audience, that is, potential customers, or increase loyalty. Quality work with social networks will ultimately lead to sales.
Reputation
Let’s understand what provides the business recognition and reputation to the brand. Imagine a situation: you want to buy some clothes or accessories in an online store. Probably the first stores you remember will be the most popular ones. Most likely you will go shopping right there, although there are many other small shops.
Let’s say you are not satisfied with something on well-known sites – you find other online stores. On the site, you cannot find any reviews or terms of delivery, no information about the product you are interested in. And if you, even after looking for information about this online store somewhere else, do not find reviews, then you will most likely return to the original version. The availability of reviews and your personal successful experience of shopping in a particular store will increase confidence in this service, which means that the number of purchases will grow right away.
Therefore, it is worth working on the recognition and reputation of the brand. Reputation is the feedback from customers. Reputation is what people talk and write about you. Social networks help to spread this information, which is very important. The main reviews are there.
Communication
Communication with the target audience is also very important because you can tell about yourself in the first place. You will also be able to get feedback from your direct customers, work out the negative situations if suddenly the customer did not like something.
Situations are different, there may be some overlap, but a dissatisfied customer will immediately spread the word on the Internet, and you can quickly level this negative experience and turn it to your advantage. If customers see that you do not leave them in a difficult situation and try to solve their problems, they will trust you more and will come back more often.
Loyalty
It has already been said many times about loyalty: due to the fact that you will have loyal customers, one of them will become a lawyer for the brand, he will protect you against unpleasant, controversial situations; someone will tell their friends and relatives about you, about your product, which will lead to re-sales and increase sales in general.
It is important to understand that social media is not magic, it is not a magic pill. Don’t expect miracles, they just won’t sell by themselves. You must dedicate your time and work.
Which social media platform to choose?
In order to determine which social media is suitable for your project, you need to understand its features. Let’s take a look at some of them:
This platform is considered one of the biggest and has already managed to win the attention of a multimillion audience. This is one of the most favourite social networks of representatives of creative and service business. Most popular beauty salons, art studios, art workshops, restaurants, photo labs, dance groups today actively maintain Instagram accounts.
A feature of the site is the placement of photos, short videos, stories and IGTV.
Post pictures of your new products, or a video explaining your service. Use stories to attract and entertain customers. Show the atmosphere and people that work in your company. Make sure to get to know followers and to let them get to know you.
At least once a week, dedicate your post to your customers, and the number of people who want to follow you will increase dramatically.
Facebook is still one of the most universal social media networks for business. The number of Facebook accounts reached 1.71 billion. Of these, slightly more than a billion use the mobile version of the social network. Even considering that some users have multiple accounts, the number of people registered on Facebook is almost 25% of the world’s population. At the same time, the accounts belong to people of various ages and social statuses.
Twitter is a microblogging social network where users around the world post short messages on their pages that are available to everyone.
The idea for the project belongs to programmer Jack Dorsey, who just wanted to exchange instant messages with friends, and for this, he created a special program. Initially, it was used only by Dorsey and his colleagues, but after a year the number of users reached 60,000. In 2008, it was announced that during the existence of the project, 25 million tweets had already been published on Twitter. There are now about 1,000 new tweets posted every minute. The project supports several dozen languages and covers an audience from more than 150 countries.
The uniqueness of Twitter is in the functions it provides to its users.
Pinterest never ceases to amaze with its development. Today, Instagram’s visual competitor continues to generate more traffic than popular LinkedIn, Reddit and Twitter.
The main advantage of a social network for business is the visual component. During its 11 years of existence, Pinterest has won the trust of designers, artists, painters, photographers, architects, and other representatives of the creative professions with a visual background. Restaurants and cafés, tattoo studios and wedding salons, photo centres and rental outlets, film studios and beauty salons are also actively using this social network.
How to quickly evaluate the effectiveness of the selected social network?
If you spend enough time promoting your business on the social network and create quality posts, the results will come fast. Obviously, users will pay attention to the variety of content, activeness, work with partners or other efforts. You will quickly feel how the followers of your account will turn into customers, buyers or users of your product or service.
There are also useful analytics tools for assessing the activity and involvement of subscribers in social networks.
Communication tools and their importance
Let’s get back to the main benefit of social media for your business – communication with your clients which will lead to other benefits. But if you don’t have good communication inside your company, between your employees, then communication with your clients means nothing. That is why using effective communication tools is so important.
The work of a business company is based on the exchange of information. The task of the manager is to regulate this process.
Business communication in a company is necessary for the following tasks:
- Colleagues in different positions can exchange data.
- An intellectual and emotional exchange of management information is organised.
- Colleagues establish mutual connections.
- Communication determines the nature of the relationship within the company.
- In the process of work, colleagues communicate and achieve common goals more successfully.
Currently, almost all means of business communications are widely used in business and are quite effective. Many managers cannot imagine the creation and development of a business without them, allocating funds for their development and improvement.
A wide variety of business communication tools allows you to choose different schemes of interaction with partners and clients for effective communication. Organisation of video conferencing, work with e-mail and voice messages will help to establish effective teamwork of employees on projects, increase the speed of decision-making on managing a company, as well as improve the interaction between departments.
Nowadays, corporate communications have increased requirements for reliability and functionality. After all, even minor disruptions in teamwork can lead to serious consequences.
You are probably already using a few apps for different purposes. You have one for one team, the other for another team. One tool is for a certain task, the second for video conferences, the third for emails. It can be quite confusing and chaotic. A problem solution is simple. Try alternatives to Teams or other narrowly focused tools.
Find a comprehensive solution for working with information, e-mail, files, spreadsheets, voice messages and text messages. It must have a secure mode of operation that will ensure the safety of your information. The organisation must be able to achieve information transparency and openness of employees’ actions in teamwork on a project. Make sure that the employees located in different countries and continents will be able to exchange huge amounts of information in a matter of seconds. It is not the largest organisation that wins, but the fastest one.
Conclusion
As you can see communication is the key to success. And by communication, we mean communication with your clients using social media and within the company. Without communication, the development of the company is impossible. It evaluates the positive effect of management decisions.
Effective communication in the organisation helps to interact with employees and departments, removes formality in the course of their mutual actions. Make sure to keep in step with the times. Use social media that your clients are using and use communication tools that will be effective, safe and convenient.