The Importance of Social Media for Business
Nowadays, technology is evolving fast and vast. Every people in this world keep adapting with new technology and getting used to it. One of those technology products is social media. Social media is a forms of electronic communication, such as website for social networking, which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (Webster, n.d.). Almost every people today have social media account and mostly active interacting with it every time. Updating feeds, checking another people status, and commenting on other post is becoming a new habit for human.
Based on goodfirms.co, people nowadays are using at least 4 platforms in a day1 . This phenomenon should be seen by business and reform it to be their new canal of communication, marketing, or even collaboration. To make it simple, creating feeds in social media is relatively cheap (or free), and it can give similar or even better effect than conventional advertisement that cost a lot of money. Before today social media era like Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, the form communication is limited to website or blog which still in one-way communication (web 1.0).
The information from business may be conveyed nicely to customer but hardly exchanging opinion from customer about the product. The business cannot know what people feel about their product. Some feedback may be received from hotline service or mail, but the quantity power is limited. Now the era has changed, the communication has skewed to web 2.0 which both end, business and customer, may interact each other in the same media.
Business can get feedback directly from their customer inside their blog, website, or forum. But those media are still relatively old than the new media, today new, as mentioned before: Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Those three are some examples of social media that mostly used by people and relatively updated real time, real second. So, why business need to be more aware of the usage of social media? Actually, is still the same as basic business process, getting the feedback from the customer. But because the data flow among social media user is relatively high, it can be a humongous source of information that can be processed.
Business can get to know what people feel, say, or think about their product, even the customer did not directly mention the business. Tag in social media (not limited to hashtag) is one of the powerful features that can be used by business. By looking for the tag in social media, business can gather information about it and process it to make a new decision or improvement. Not limited to the product mentioned, but by gathering that information, it may lead to a new idea or product that may be needed by customer.
Other than gathering data, business can use social media as an alternative form of marketing. Posting product information on social media is relatively cheaper (or can be free) than using conventional advertisement. Moreover, people nowadays are very eager to like, share, and comment post in social media. Just by posting a feed about product, highly chance business social media page’s follower will share it to their friends. In conclusion, making the social media as a center of communication between
business and customer for today is a very important and a good thing. Optimizing the social media is becoming a must for every business today.
References:
https://www.goodfirms.co/resources/social-media-usage-user-habits-to-know
