…Serious Marketing Tool, or Just for Fun?
According to Wikipedia, Social Media
“are primarily Internet- and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings.”
In reality this translates to the formation of sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Bebo, etc. The amount of people accessing these sites is huge and statistics show that this number is still growing. In the past year, there has been a 35% increase in the number of people accessing social media sites in Europe (ComScore World Metrix).
The question for those in the freight industry however is whether these new sources of communication can be used in a commercial setting.
The key to using social media is to view it as a long term game plan. PPC can give an instant boost to web statistics and revenue. However, this can be an expensive and draining channel. SEO work, such as the use of social media platforms (Facebook, YouTube etc) on the other hand can provide more sustained benefits well into the future.
What is crucial to the use of social media marketing is the idea of conversing with your customers. While it is important to maintain a business tone in conversations (and not forgetting the importance of confidentiality between clients), if you can provide some information which will make a person’s job easier, you’ve got a friend. And information can vary from tables of statistics, to a short promotional video, to commeting on recents events which impact on your business (and therefore your customers too). Remember that your customers are not one dimensional characters, so why should you act in one dimension?
Dell is a great case study of how social media can help a corporation interact with its customers. Dell has harnassed the power of the blog world to let them know exactly what their customers think of them, and to provide inspiration for how to fix discontentment. It can be daunting knowing exactly what your customers think about your company, but hiding in the sand isn’t an option. Once you become aware of a problem, you at least have an opportunity to deal with it. If you want your company to be seen as reputable, innovative and ‘one of the big guys’ then your going to have to start listening to you customers.
