According to surveys conducted by the Federal Statistical Office, 53 percent of Internet users in the United States already used social networks or social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter for their private communication in 2011. One reason for this rapid growth is seen by experts in the natural human need to exchange ideas and build relationships with one another. This trend offers tremendous opportunities for businesses to engage in strategic social networking.
Social Media: Wide range of applications
It is now necessary to make these various possibilities usable and manageable. This allows companies to be more successful in the market by not only exchanging information with their reference groups, such as customers, partners, or potential employees, but also designing their offers accordingly.
Social Media: Enhancing your own web presence
Social networks are increasingly taking place in everyday business. In small and medium-sized businesses, 39% already use social media as a recent BITKOM survey found. These companies even invest above-average in this area: with 15 percent, they have a higher percentage of social media planners than large companies with ten percent.
Social Media: Necessary Professionalization
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Social Media: The right tools
The initial concerns about the meaningfulness of an engagement are fading. Nowadays almost everyone, whether private or professional, is on the net, and the Internet has established itself as a suitable communication platform for all industries. Thus, the direct exchange with end users via social media is ideal for B2C companies.
As a result, many have already taken the logical step towards social media and taken up related dialog marketing concepts. The trend towards social media has been accelerated by free use, and setting up a Facebook fan page, a Twitter or XING account is a cost-effective marketing option.
There is a wide range of possible applications for companies - an indication of the great potential that social media is given. Companies use social networks to publish marketing or PR content via Facebook, YouTube & Co. or build a fan base, ie community.
Offers and content spread quickly and reach a greater reach than over traditional and comparatively cost-intensive communication channels. For example, primarily regional or national enterprises can use their social media to expand their business internationally.
Likewise, the social Web is suitable for local targeting. For example, companies can announce upcoming local events for their target audience on Facebook or via Hangouts on Google+. However, companies should evaluate the various possibilities.
Experience has shown that social media offers interesting and effective application fields for everyone. In the meantime, companies from the B2B sector, such as manufacturing and mechanical engineering, are increasingly present in the social network. Prominent social networks can be described as a modern extension of their own homepage.
The exchange between customers and companies, but also between customers, is conceivable in social networks. This is the big advantage: Companies can include customers in decision-making or product development processes, for example through surveys. Recommendations, reviews and opinions from friends, family and experts on products and services are obtained online.
A recent BITKOM study has shown how important this secondary opinion is in purchasing behavior. More than 90 percent of the users find out about the Web before buying a product or service. The network effect can have positive as well as negative consequences for companies. In this way, companies can also receive direct feedback on their brand and gain valuable insights about customer behavior.
However, social media platforms should no longer be used only by marketing and communications departments. The service department can also benefit from this: Facebook or Twitter allows companies to provide their customers with a point of entry to address problems and issues in real-time.
Social Media: Outlook
Customers feel themselves thereby taken seriously and the escalation of a problem can be avoided. Negative entries and comments in evaluation platforms can even prevent companies in this way.
Social media platforms can also play an important role in sales, for example through direct sales processes via Facebook or the already established contact management via XING. Targeted social media monitoring helps companies win new customers. It allows them to identify the needs of people and to draw attention to the products or services they offer.
Social Media: Statement - Start where it's most useful
Social CRM, however, also calls for a rethink. It is not so much about making social media opportunistic, but primarily devoting itself strategically to the topic. This requires a corresponding corporate culture, cultivating relationships and initiating dialogues, even encouraging them.
Recently, BITKOM President Prof. Dieter Kempf spoke in favor of organizing social media activities in small and medium-sized businesses. The field should not be left to the big corporations. This includes the development of an effective strategy, the development of social media expertise in the company, as well as the use of professional tools for the planning, implementation and measurement of social media activities.
When developing their strategies, companies should pay attention to the following:
Social Media: Statement - analysis and reconnaissance instead of prohibitions
The right software tools are crucial for the successful implementation of the social media strategy. In addition to widespread free-of-charge user tools such as Google Analytics, IT vendors are now increasingly offering special social media solutions to businesses.
These address the challenges described. In addition to SAP CRM and SAP Customer OnDemand, which can be enriched with social media data, SAP currently offers other special software solutions for the social media sector.
The cloud solution SAP Social Media Analytics by NetBase enables the monitoring of social media. However, it not only scans the most important sources so that companies can search for topics or terms flexibly, but sentiment analysis and NLP technology (Natural Language Processing) can also be used to carry out deep, accurate and therefore detailed analyzes. In this way, social media managers or marketing executives can create flexible analyzes and evaluations of their campaigns, brands or games.
With the increasing number of Facebook fanpages or Twitter channels a company is setting up, the challenge is also growing. For example, information from social media channels, such as a service request to a product or feedback on a campaign, often flows back to the company, namely the social media team.
The best security-freeware
Due to the organizational and time-critical challenges, the team can quickly reach its limits. The recently launched cloud solution, SAP Social Customer Engagement OnDemand, enables companies to make their social media appearance more professional, efficient and sustainable. "
Social networks are no longer a hype issue for a long time and are increasingly becoming a permanent fixture in everyday business. SMEs should see social media as an attractive and at the same time cost-manageable tool with great potential.
Social recruiting is one area where the use of social networks is becoming increasingly important. Building an attractive online employer brand can help companies identify new employees, communicate with them, and qualify them quickly and efficiently. The transparency of the social networks allows for an accuracy between the job profile and the candidate profile, thus increasing the efficiency and quality of the recruiting processes.
The BITKOM has recently asked companies about their relationship to social media. After all, nearly half (47 percent) of all companies in the United States use social media. A further 15 percent already have concrete plans to start shortly. The figures show social media platforms are on the way to becoming the standard in American companies. So has the traditional middle class set its restraint against Facebook, Twitter and Co.? Not yet quite so, a closer look at the figures: Many understand social media mainly as a marketing tool. 82 percent stated that they used social media to increase their visibility and 72 percent wanted to attract customers.
This suggests that many have not yet fully grasped the deeper reason for social media. This is to use the Web 2.0 tools to network more effectively inside and outside the organization. This may help to increase the popularity of a brand. The real purpose of this is, however, to make internal and external processes and communication structures more efficient and share knowledge - in order to achieve more and better together. In this cultural dimension of "sharing together", the real value of social media - and its great potential, especially for classic medium-sized businesses from the B2B environment, whose customers are not primarily fond of Facebook
Having accepted this basic idea, they will also recognize where and how the social media tools can be useful in their everyday work
Where there are many possibilities, however, there is always the risk of spreading. Therefore, here are a few success factors for the use of social media in the company: for example, it is recommended to start with simple projects that are easy to implement, but which are real benefits - for example the organization of employee images in an online image network like Flickr . It is also advisable not to simply push the social media initiative into the IT department, but to make it a boss and to act as a model. It is also important that employees get clear guidelines on how to use social media.
Further tips are available from experts and, of course, on the Internet. Only small and medium-sized enterprises should not hesitate too long. The next generation of employees will determine the quality of their workplaces according to the work equipment they are used to. And there are social media platforms at the top of the wishlist.
The fact that social media platforms are communication channels should be an obligation for each company to deal with it. Facebook, XING, Twitter, Youtube, forums or blogs: These are not just platforms for non-committal chatter, but the basis for informing the market, strengthening the image, motivating employees and even winning new customers. At the end of the day, social media platforms are actually revenue-relevant.
And then the problems begin. The potential of the new networks is immense, but at the same time they can easily misuse cybercriminals as a gateway for malicious software. Almost alarming is the rapidly increasing number of malicious links on social media platforms - disguised for the user as innocent and attractive. Any click on it can lead to an infected site and compromise the integrity of the computer or even the entire IT.
For many, this is the reason to simply block the use of Facebook, Twitter & Co. and block access. However, this does not put the workforce on the brink of excitement and hides a further handicap, as important communication channels remain unused and the dialogue with the market is waning.
What to do? Traditional protection mechanisms such as firewalls or virus scanners are hardly equipped for this modern form of threat. Rather, the vast majority of today's attacks on company data require a multi-layered defense concept. This includes classic measures, but also modern, specific social media security solutions.
A central approach is the real-time data analysis, ie the continuous monitoring of posts and links. If suspicious links are tracked, the URLs for the users are immediately blocked - and not the entire social media platform. Executable files or unknown scripts are also blocking candidates. In the case of terms which have been defined as undesirable in advance and are found in posts, it is useful if users or admins are notified. It is ideal if such a technology can be directly integrated into the social networks.
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Technology alone is not sufficient, however, because the vigilance and behavior of the users are just as essential. You always have to keep up to date with the latest fraudulents, in order to avoid possibly the fatal click. Regular training is just as essential as mandatory user guidelines, which specify in detail the type of information which groups of employees are allowed to disclose in the network at all, which form of addressing is appropriate to the customer contact, or how passwords are most secure to be set up.
The child with the bathing water: This was never a viable way, the blocking of complete social media platforms is therefore hardly advisable. Adequate technology and regular user education are the wiser alternative.
