Social media has indeed come a long way and is today impacting the fortunes of many business houses.
Many people initially thought that major social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn were passing fads headed for some inglorious demise.
But all the prophets of doom were proved wrong and today over 75% of Fortune 500 business organizations have an official social team to actively participate and monitor social media.
But most of these social media projects by business organizations are merely scratching the surface of social media and lacking in depth. What is now needed is fine-tuning your strategy for the next wave of social media changes
The way people access the Internet has tremendously changed. Today, about 35 percent of all users own a smart phone and about another 33 percent of the population is accessing the Internet on a tablet.
To exploit the full potential of social media, merely launching a few corporate accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter will not suffice. The coming years will witness more business houses shifting social media from just the corporate level.
The first wave of social media was more about employee collaboration. The second wave was focusing on building customer relationship, corporate marketing, and effective communications. Many business organizations are still operating at this stage.
Now businesses are integrating social media into their overall marketing plans. In the year 2014, more and more business enterprises will usher in the third wave of social business by empowering every employee across the organization to participate in social media.
Marketing teams will continue to use major social sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn for creating and spreading brand awareness, sales teams will increasingly tap into social networks for new ways to reach and engage with their existing and prospective customers and provide improved levels of service.
The expectation is businesses will vie with one another to reinforce their brand and its value to clients. Towards this end, they will fine-tune their SMM strategies. The formula would be to:
- Train employees to effectively use social media for business
- Create social business programs and FAQs
- Apply key business metrics to turn social media head-on into real business process
- Greater emphasis will be on Social media marketing ROI.
In short, the third wave of social business will mobilize the entire workforce and meaningfully engage at personal as well as local levels.
As the pace of technological advancement continues to increase, the use of social media will incredibly enlarge during 2014