Thursday, June 04, 2009

5 Important Approaches for Social Networking for Companies

Many corporate are trying to jump the social networking band wagon. The social networking websites’ links, icons and/or logos are being shown on most of the corporate websites as they want to increase their reach to and want to easily communicate with the folks in their network – customers, prospects or anyone.

Here are the 5 important approaches that they need to be confident of performing prior to jumping in the networking band wagon.
  1. Define Objectives: Companies first need to define the objectives and goals as to what they want to achieve by social networking. Defining them before will help the contribution and participation more interesting and productive.
  2. Channel of Communication: Companies need to keep in mind that networking in this media is not to increase the sales. It is a channel to make your customers and prospects to communicate with the company in a simpler way. And the other way round, may be customers do not want to receive a phone call or an e-mail but, wants to read the corporate blog or tweet. And the customer may feel comfortable to respond back or ask questions through the same channel.
  3. Listen to Customers: This is the most important thing that corporate companies need to be keeping in mind. The jump in social networking makes it easily accessible to their customers and prospects. Listen to them first. The more the knowledge is shared with the customers and prospects to solve the issues the more satisfied the customer gets. Thus, building a good reputation in the market.
  4. Track Customers Talking: Search the online media frequently to find out what people are talking about the company. And companies need to immediately attend, communicate the updates to them immediately. This networking channel is to build the brand and not to start the sales cycle. There are tools available which can help to keep track of this - TweetScan, RSS feeds. Companies can also try Andy Beal’s trackur tool.
  5. Be Real and Own: People like communicating through this channel as they feel they are talking to a responsible person from a corporate who listens to them. So, one who communicates from the company side needs to be a real person who can own the issue or problem being talked about and respond back with a solution to them.
Also read related posts -
The Four Important Steps to Start Social Networking for Business
6 Tips To Be Successful In Social Media Marketing

2 comments:

Marcie Casas said...

Great post! Companies engaging in social networking should be focused on building relationships not sales. I wrote about a similar topic here http://bit.ly/iXbrc on how companies should build online communities for the right reasons.

Too many times, I've seen companies wanting to start a community or engage in social media just to mine for data or sales leads. Definitely not the right approach.

@marciecasas
www.gdc-co.com/blog

Aashish Malve said...

Very true Marcie. Social networking is for conversations and not for conversions.