Social relationship management is an indispensable part of social media marketing. To say that the meaning of the expression "word-of-mouth" has changed over the past 10 years is an understatement. Word-of-mouth is used to describe the act of sitting down to lunch with five of your friends or colleagues and telling them good (or bad) things about the latest product or service you purchased. These friends might relay your message to one other person in their circle, and in total, you are responsible for spreading the news about this product or service among 12-15 people over the course of a day.
Things are different now.
Social Relationship Management: Managing What Your Customers Say About You
Today, we live in a fast-paced digital world where a London consumer's negative experience with a brand reaches New York Twitter feeds in a matter of seconds. A few favorites and a retweet later and hundreds of people have received real-time "word-of-mouth" news about this negative experience.
As a brand, the takeaway here is that social or digital word-of-mouth is less concerned with what you say and more focused on what your audience and potential customers say about you. In 2015, you need to manage your brand and its reputation because no customer is going to think you're a great company just because you say so!
To fill you in on how and why brand and reputation are so important in today's digital marketing world, we created an infographic outlining what a good social media relationship management platform can do for your brand. Enjoy!
45% of customers share negative reviews on social media. 88% of customers are influenced by online customer service reviews when making a purchase decision. These numbers simply can't be ignored, and they also only mean one thing: online reviews have superpowers! Power enough to sink your brand or to lift it well above your straggling competitors; the choice rests with you and how you manage and influence what those reviews say about your brand. Below is the process and potential outcome of using a social media relationship management platform:
Have you ever tried to coordinate social media campaigns without a plan? It can be a disaster of who's-going-to-post-what proportions, not to mention the scores of forwarded emails asking for tweets to be scheduled and other off-the-cuff requests. Everything's better with a plan.
Working with a social media relationship management platform helps you and your team get all your social media ducks in a row if only to reduce stress and increase productivity. From assigning tasks to scheduling and creating posts for publication, the end benefit is total consolidation of the team's activity, which makes tracking and management a breeze (especially when compared to not using a platform!).
The more organized and dedicated your social media activity appears, the more likely you are to induce engagement from your followers. Inactive profiles or sporadic, meaningless posts just won't foster any interest among your audience. Developing a unified and consistent brand voice - instead of sounding like numerous different people scrambling behind the scenes to get posts up - is also vital to social media success. Additionally, using a dedicated social media relationship management platform gives you easy access to your library of digital content and of course, allows you to target a specific niche audience.
We talk a lot about the importance of listening to your audience, and there's no better listening arena than social media. However, it's no easy task to tune into every platform out there, which is - you guessed it - where using a social media relationship management platform comes in handy.
Not only is it easy to monitor your feeds for the mention of certain words or the use of a given hashtag, you can also identify top industry influencers and feed them a steady stream of your content. At the end of the day, perhaps the biggest plus to using a relationship management platform is the ability to measure, report on and attribute dollar values to the engagement you drive through social media.
And that's all she wrote for social relationship management! Here's the beautiful infographic in its entirety, along with an embed code in case you'd like to share and write about it on your site. Contact WSI for more information on social relationship management and other social media tactics.
