Can a company really benefit from Twitter?
The former GE CEO said:
“We have only two sources of competitive advantage:
1) the ability to learn more about our customers faster than the competition, and
2) the ability to turn that learning into action faster than the competition.”
I’ve shared some of the personal benefits I receive as a result of Twitter. Here’s a list of some of the benefits companies can realize:
1. There’s the potential to learn more about your customers at a faster rate, than ever before.
2. In order to take customer relationships (and the actual company) to the next level from a social media perspective (and beyond your competitors), move it past listening and past conversation to collaboration with customers.
3. Social media is not a campaign. It’s a relationship w/ customers. Through contests, genuine interaction, virtual focus groups, and appreciation of feedback and collaboration.
4. By enlisting customers to collaborate via social media, there’s an opportunity to gain fresh perspectives on what the customer’s experience is and should be with our products and services. What ideas do they have for improvement? Why do they feel that way? We can and should listen, react, and respond to customer ideas as well as customer issues beyond simply “solving the problem” to “what can we do better?”.
5. Research is proving that the companies that succeed with social media will move it beyond simple communication to actually learning and taking action on the information and input received. That builds both loyalty and a sense of belonging with a brand for your customers. In today’s market, that’s huge. Companies that put this into action have the ability to leap-frog their competitors and cement customer/brand loyalty. Done correctly, it can lead to increased market share and sales.
6. Another whole topic — the search functionality and information that can be gleaned from social media about your customers, the customers of competitor brands, and the competitors themselves.
7. Last but not least, social media can and should be part of every company’s online shopping experience. It’s a “free” way to get your products out to the web, and potentially virally shared, with one simple tweet, digg, tumble, “facebook, etc. Integrate social media into your shopping cart.
8. New tools are being developed to help track and analyze the ROI from social media integration. If you need hard proof beyond the testimonials and articles that have been written by business owners about the benefits they’ve realized, it’s coming.
In our next post, we’ll talk about some of the tools available now to help you focus and manage social media.
Oh – and if you haven’t yet, follow me on Twitter! @kate_saunders or @successaligned
