How I use social media tools

I learn about various goods and services that are offered on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and WhatsApp groups as a consumer. I occasionally find advertisements for various goods and services on commercial and personal websites that tempt me to use them. Additionally, social media platforms give me access to information about new goods and services as well as any alterations or enhancements to currently available goods and services. These social media networks provide me the chance to communicate with other customers and express my opinions on various products. An opportunity for interacting and sharing ideas, thoughts and information about particular products with other consumers. Such information guides a consumer in making better choices when buying. An example is when checking through OLX website or Facebook, Instagram and Twitter pages and different consumers share their thoughts on particular products posted that enables them chose what to buy wisely.

The second advantage is that social media gives consumers access to wide range of products and services online and thus are able to assess what they want before making choices. An example is seeing a broad range of products on Amazon, assessing them and choosing the one to purchase.

Dangers of social media use

The use of social media exposes consumers to greater risks of being swindled, or their information leaking to cyber criminals. Most of them are tricked through requests to reset their social media account passwords. For instance, Infosecurity magazine (Seals) produced a report indicating that majority of consumers became victims of cybercrimes.

Part 2

Social media tools for a company

Companies are using social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Webpages, mobile apps, etc to reach out to consumers of their products and services. In addition, companies make use of trending social media tools such as Mention, a replacement of Google Alerts, Addvocate, Swayy, eGrabber’s Account-Researcher, Compfight, Tagboard, ManageFlitter, Socialbakers, Post Planner, and Komfo. Social media has many benefits to the company such as monitoring their consumers and competitors, researching and development (King).

Benefits of social media to companies

Social media provides several benefits to a company such as obtaining valuable customer insights, increasing brand awareness and loyalty, running targeted ads having real-time outcomes, generation of higher converting leads etc. In gaining customer insights through online tracking, a company understands consumer habits and patterns that helps them understand what consumers want. An example is the use of cookies to access consumer browsing activities that enables them understand their customers better. The second is increasing brand awareness. For instance, Apple, Inc. uses social media platforms in marketing most of its products and this has made its brand remain strong. The company uses social media analytic tools to access consumer habits and are able to manufacture products that meet these needs (Maketing Minds).

Dangers of using social media for business purposes

As long as the use of social media is beneficial to businesses, companies face several risks such as possibility of a negative publicity due to reputation mismanagement, security issues such as hacking, bugs, spy-ware etc., potential criticism, and waste of time by employees trying to engage customers online. All these have devastating implications to the profitability of the company (Nicholls).

It is pivotal for employees to consider the nature of contents they post on social media. According an article on CNN (Broderick and Grinberg), Matt Watson’s, an infamous coffee blog had very frustrating facets about being a barista and had gained popularity until it was outed by the coffee gossip blog page sprudge.com. The boss was later fired due to that post (Broderick and Grinberg).

Part 3

The use of social media by employees

Companies should ban the use of social media by their employees in marketing the company’s products, services and brand name. This is because employees may sometimes be reckless and may post damaging content that my affect the company’s reputation. In addition, employees may risk posting anything especially when under drugs, sick or depressed.

Innovative suggestion

In order to improve the use of social media to enhance a company’s productivity, performance, employee satisfaction, visibility, customer service and service/product quality, several strategic approaches must be put in place. First is acquiring a person who will take full responsibility in marketing using social media platform. This will ensure no content posted on social media platform poses any risks to the reputation of the company. The appointed social media leader should add audios to social media marketing, beef up blogging, bring new life into old content, draw on the community, encourage customer feedback, be able to generate buzz using infographics, install pin it buttons, ensure participation in the customer experience, maximize impacts of social media with visuals, and participate in conversations. In addition, the leader should ensure ramping up of online reviews, share contents on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube etc. The management should also increase their social media budget, as it is important tool for marketing.

References

Broderick, Ryan and Emanuella Grinberg. “10 people who learned social media can get you fired.” CNN 6 June 2013. 31 March 2017. .

King, Cindy. 14 Social Media Tools Used by Marketing Pros. 4 September 2013. 31 March 2017. .

Maketing Minds. Apple’s Branding Strategy. 2016. 31 March 2017. .

Nicholls, Steve. Top five risks companies face when using social media and how to avoid damaging the brand. 26 June 2012. 31 March 2017. .

Seals, Tara. “45% of Consumers are Victims of Cybercrime.” Infosecurity Magazine 27 October 2016. .