A Quick Primer on Using Social Media for Business

Last month, I talked about how Twitter can be used as a potential channel for customer feedback and support. This month, we have a full feature story in this issue on how various companies have benefited from social media. A Delhi-based company that sells frozen yogurt, Cocoberry, managed to build up a fan base of more than 1 lakh users on Facebook within two years of its launch. The famous portal Snapdeal.com has in excess of 3.5L fans across different social media.

NeoCricket, the cricket channel has managed to draw 27,000 fans on Facebook, even during off-season, and clocks about a thousand comments per day on social networking sites from various media. While the social media platforms do attract a lot of companies, it's only a few (like the above three) that manage to leverage them the right way. So here, I'd like to focus on what are some of the basic things that should or should not be done to succeed on the social media platform.

What is it that you really want to achieve with social media is the first question you need to answer? Is it branding and marketing? Is it sales, customer support, or is it something else? Unless you know what you're really aiming for, your efforts will be lost. Next, you need to decide how you're going to do it. Which social media platform has your target audience and customers? Are they found more on one platform than another, or are they spread across? If it's the latter, then you'll need to use tools that can manage and monitor multiple platforms.

Only when you know all this can you allocate the required resources for it-budgets, manpower, etc. Yes, you do need to allocate budgets and dedicated resources if you want to succeed on the social media platform. You need a proper plan for executing the various activities on it. PepsiCo for instance, redirected $20 million of its Super Bowl advertising budget last year into a social media campaign, called the Pepsi Refresh Project. Cocoberry for instance, conducts events like fashion shows, golf outings, provides free tickets to movie premiers, concerts, etc for people who join their fan club. All of these come at a cost and are well-planned activities.

So the important thing to remember is that the only thing you get for free in social media is the platform with lots of users already on it. The execution and planning to leverage it has to be done by you. It's like any other channel, e.g. TV, magazines, etc. You could book a slot in a TV channel for instance, but you'll still need to spend time, money, and manpower into building the content for it. You'll be glad to know that based on popular demand, we've started two regular sections in PCQuest from this month onwards-Open Source and Cloud Computing. This month, we've done a special feature on how to implement Identity and Access Management in your organization using open source tools. Likewise, in the cloud computing section, we've talked about the most popular online storage services that are out there in the cloud.

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