How Social Media Changed the Way Businesses Engage Consumers

How Social Media Changed the Way Businesses Engage Consumers

Over the past few years, social media has been almost omnipresent in our society that it can be easily taken for granted. However, social media platforms have furnished us with a lot of benefits that apply to individuals as well as businesses. From advertising and marketing to customer service, this new media has a significant impact on the way businesses engage their clients.

Customer service through social media

Customer service is all about connecting a business with its customer base, and social media naturally smoothens this relationship in a manner that can be more direct, organized and efficient. Common issues, for example, could be easily resolved by linking a customer to a page that has the answers they need.

Businesses may also turn negative situations into positive ones, and this is especially evident with large companies on Twitter. If you take a look at the Twitter account of Delta Airlines, you might observe that, aside from marketing and branding drives, a huge part of their interactions are direct apologies to clients or attempts to resolve problems and disputes. This can be an excellent way to let customers know that, if they have questions or problems related to their company, they can send them a message over social media and receive a quick response. This may not only serve as a customer service tactic, but also as a PR play that establishes their image as a brand that cares.

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Social media marketing

Social media platforms are also very flexible and multifunctional. Whether a business wants to target people who might want to buy their products or those who are looking to franchise, social media marketing is a versatile tool to reach any type of audience.

A prominent impact that social media has on marketing is how it can provide better insights. Marketers have access to massive amounts of insights and data that were undetected in traditional means. Through social media, they may study their customer base over long periods of time. Marketers could tell a lot about someone based on posts liked, content shared, profile information, and more. The data they collect can then be used to build highly targeted campaigns.

Social media could also make marketing campaigns seem more organic. Many businesses want their campaigns to be so natural that the audience would not see them as blatant advertisements — a feat which can be quite difficult in the past. Now, brands can be more ubiquitous in their marketing by always being there for their customers and becoming part of the social experience.

Advertising in social media

Most popular social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, have so much data on their users that advertisers can now invest in cost-effective and highly-targeted advertising.

Facebook algorithms, in particular, are able to collect the personal data of their users, so the platform would know if the user gets married, is looking for a job, or is suffering from hypertension. When advertisers choose to advertise on Facebook, they may zone in on extremely specific audiences. A sporting goods store in Boston, for example, can have their ads displayed to parents in Massachusetts who have an annual income of $50,000 to $75,000 and have kids aged 8 to 15. Achieving this degree of specificity in an advertising strategy would have been a painstaking process in the past.

It might be difficult to predict how social media could evolve further in the future. Despite this, it is just as hard to imagine these platforms going extinct anytime soon. As such, more and more businesses may invest and continue investing in this innovative medium.

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