There can be tangible business benefits to embracing the principles of social networking. Sample benefits include the following:
Customer Engagement:
- Customer engagement: more personal, faster and two-way communications
- Target & reach a number of people it would be impossible to reach otherwise geographically
- Research/ test & “warm up” potential relationships before meeting in person
- Shift from one-way to 2-way communications for customer-to-brand and customer-to-customer
- Customize and personalize a customer’s experience
- Empower customers & keep customer mindshare
- Faster resolution to customer problems
- Improve customer service, satisfaction, relations, feedback, retention & referrals
- Enable organic and bottom-up innovation from consumer
- Introduce one another to people or methods that can help increase profits and improve operations
- Improve targeting for potential customers
- Send instant updates/ messages about new activities
- Increase event attendance
- Image building- reputation management/ appear more forward-thinking / innovative to customers/ peers.
- Builds credibility and trust in expertise and quality
- Create image of trust, transparency, openness, honest and authenticity
- Stay alert and keep updated on what is being said about your business
- Turn negative perceptions into positives
- Grow brand awareness, recognition, value, loyalty & equity
- Enhance competitive advantage / edge/ position in today's digital economy
- Be the expert resource that everyone looks to for solutions and answers
- Thought leadership and knowledge management contributions-i.e. white papers, slideshows, articles, research
- Innovate faster as SN is an innovations proposition
Networking & Information:
- Networking with customers, peers, clients, contacts, venders, employees, etc.
- Share information, skills, knowledge, ideas and opinions
- Keep up with your peers and clients who already use SN
- Enhance collective thinking and morale with employees and venders
- Ability to meet large numbers of business people without the time and expense
- Word of mouth (WOM) and Viral Marketing improvements-incredibly viral
- Enable employees to network with each other and exchange knowledge
- Stay connected to volunteers and supporters in nonprofits
- Connect people with common interests with your own ‘groups’ and ‘forums’
Sales/ Economic Enhancement:
- Improve sales cycle, velocity, qualification process, conversion rates, closure
- Increase subscribers/ opt-in lists
- Find people or firms that map closely to their USPs (unique selling propositions)
- Test and define differentiation and unique selling proposition
- Highly measurable and defined sales outcome metrics
- Possibly a direct source of revenue
- Cost savings versus higher priced traditional marketing programs and channels
- ROI improvement by cutting marketing, customer service, sales and related support costs
Internet-Based Benefits:
- Allows for great flexibility and easy to change content than other information content in websites, printed materials, etc.
- Build inbound organic links to increase visits to your web site, blogs, images and photos, videos, slide shows, wiki entries, podcasts, and others.
- Expand promotional and announcement activities: new products/ services, live video, giveaways, product announcements, contests and live-updates
- Attach a blog or forum for ‘real’ conversations and feedback
- Enhanced SEO- Rank higher in organic search engines
Recruitment:
- Recruitment of employees
- Recruitment of partners and form joint ventures
- Recruit capital investment
- On-boarding improvements in acquiring, accommodating, assimilating and accelerating new team members
