Wednesday, February 23, 2011

How to integrating social media into your customer service??

As with any marketing and/or social media effort, it's critical to set your objectives and create related metrics to assess your success. Here are five metrics to help you monitor integrating social media into your customer service delivery.

  1. Content creation. Track the amount of content that users contribute in terms of ratings and reviews, social media interactions, photographs, videos, and other formats.
  2. Award Winning Customer Service: 101 Ways to Guarantee Great PerformanceNumber of interactions. Track the number of fans and followers. Bear in mind you may need to entice consumers with special deals and bonuses. Additionally, understand how each platform works and how to be part of the community, or your actions will backfire.
  3. Number of issues identified and responded to. In addition to participating in the conversation on your website and tailored company outposts like Twitter and Facebook, use brand monitoring tools to find and reply to consumer issues.
  4. Sales. Measure sales related to your social media customer service efforts. Have they contributed to your overall sales? Are these efforts helping customers decide what to purchase and do they contribute in a positive way to your brand association and company revenues?
  5. Customer service resources. Consider these three important elements. Are you reducing customer service inquiries via other channels? Social media translates to a lower cost channel in many cases. Are you allocating customer service headcount appropriately? Do you have enough people assigned to each channel? Also, monitor for increased usage as this channel becomes more efficient. People who didn't want to deal with customer service may do so on social media.

Friday, February 18, 2011

Social media marketing on the rise in United States

The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business SuccessIn the past 1 year, there has been a 39% increase in the number of local businesses using social networking sites to market their products, according to the quarterly Merchant Confidence Index survey of more than 8,500 small and local business owners across the United States. Today, 70% use the social media site of 500+ million accountholders, compared with 50% last year, the report said.

This makes Facebook the most widely used marketing method among local merchants, with 66% of local businesses tapping Google to educate consumers about their goods, according to the study.

Perhaps Facebook's name-recognition and its immediate integration with the social media site helped propel the company's location service past competitor Foursquare: 32% of respondents use Facebook Places, and another 12% said they plan to use this tool in the coming months. By comparison, Foursquare use is up only 2% from last year, with about 9% of those polled using this service, the study found.

Twitter is gaining traction among local businesses, with almost 40% of those queried now using the microblogging site to build awareness and community, up from 32% in the same period a year ago, said MerchantCircle.
So where are the companies going to market there brands?? The trend of marketing professionals moving out of traditional ways of marketing to new way of social media is on the high. Needless to say that all companies has recognized the power of online customer. They can either build or destroy any brand within no time. So watch out guys...

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Advantages of using Twitter for a blogger.


          Twitter has gained immense popularity in recent times. As a blogger, you can use Twitter as a marketing tool to drive more web traffic to your blog. Apart from this you can use Twitter in many different ways to enhance the content of your blog. I have discussed some of the major advantages of using Twitter for a blogger.
  1. Get Ideas: One of the great benefits of Twitter would be to use it as a research tool to derive ideas for your blog content. Reading the tweets of so many users would definitely give new ideas in your mind about an interesting subject about which you can write in your blog. Besides, if you are not sure if the blog subject you are thinking about will strike a chord with readers or not, you can simply pose a question regarding your selected subject as your tweet. Responses from your followers will help you sort any confusion you may have regarding your blog subject.
  2. Twitter Marketing: An Hour a DayMarketing tool: Since, Tweets are limited to 140 characters; you can expect to receive quick responses, thus saving your valuable time. One of the most obvious uses of Twitter is to use it as marketing tool for your blog. Use your tweets to suggest your followers about blog updates and you will have more traffic being channelled to your blog.
  3. Find people: Twitter is also a great platform to find people who have similar interests. Use it as a networking platform to connect with like-minded people, who will find your blog posts and blog subjects interesting and this way you can generate more web traffic to your blog. Use 'Find People' to locate other Twitter accounts you want to follow. Then enter your keywords, related industries, locations or other defining detail to locate followers, and begin following them.
  4. Engage with people: Twitter is all about conversation so if you are only posting information about your business and that people should buy from you; they will quickly ignore you or turn you in for spam. Engage people in conversation, offer tips that are related to your business such as new trends, or even just post about the weather or your pets. Some people prefer not to post too much personal information, but you can still build good relationships without talking about your personal life.
  5. RDQNCN569BER

Some Awesome principles of social media marketing

Here are some of the most important do’s and don’ts of social media marketing.
  1. Do not try advertise but ENGAGE: People come to Facebook to socialize, to be amused, and to get some useful info, but almost nobody comes deliberately to buy something. To reach people on FB, you need to grab their attention by giving them something they need. Like something for free!!
  2. Give a free Demo: Its always great to offer your product for them to use. FB’s sharing tools to give them a taste of how great that something is, rather than just telling them about it. Good thing about social media is that it creates a two-way connection — an opportunity to build a stronger bond with your potential customer/future customers.
  3. Facebook Marketing: An Hour a DayTalk less—listen more: Since social media creates a two-way connection: an opportunity to build a stronger bond with your potential customer by listening to what they have to tell you and responding to them directly. In a world where customers who try to contact companies are routinely greeted same old IVR, good communication is a killer app. If fans know that you listen to them, then it can do wonderful things for your web-traffic.j
  4. Respond in time:  You should never create a FB page and forget abt it. You should visti your site and do respond to comments and questions on time. You should not let the customer think that they are talking to a wall. Response to there comments will decide if they are going to visit your site again.
  5. Let them vent: A good customer service manager told me that, every time a customer come to complaint they come to vent there frustration. And they want someone to listen to them. If you really listen to them carefully, you can win them back. If you give people a sympathetic ear, acknowledge their frustration, and demonstrate your desire to make things better, I am sure they will come back even if your product sucks!!

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Social media and marketing...

I am not writing this blog to show how social media is making news around the globe. It’s already doing it and people have found it more interesting than pornographic sites!! I am into marketing profession, so will update my blog with my experience and some important news on Online marketing and how one can profit from it. Even our click-happy comrades can learn few ideas to how to socialize over the internet and don’t get into trouble!! It’s not new to find how big brands/companies are successful or destroyed overnight by few group of online junkies...
Web Directory
OnToplist is optimized by SEO
Add blog to our directory.