In the ‘web world’ today Social media is a big thing. A lot of people use it in one or more ways and as it seems we are more and more evolving into a world where social media is becoming a very important aspect of our daily lives. At this point many companies are already exploring or using it.

So what can social media mean for a company? Is it only meant for the big enterprises or can smaller companies take advantage of it to?

Well it’s not a yes/no answer question, it depends on what you want from it. If your company deals with consumer products it’s viable or even essential to have a pick in some sort of social media. (Just to clarify: consumer products can also be service based) For branding and advertising it’s always a good idea to use social media and you can reach massive amounts of users (possible buyers of your products) in an effective way. Also customer support can be very fast via those channels. But a company has to dedicate resources to do so, if they fail it would mean advertising in a negative way.

Marketers need to understand that the branding of their company is slipping more and more out of their hands with social media. It’s a matter of following what is said by the common user and reacting on that in an appropriate way. Or hinting to the public what can be. Users are getting smarter and more and more have an opinion (e.g. me writing this blog post ) that they dare to publish via the social media channels. There is no way of knowing in advance how a certain campaign is going to evolve when users start to comment and criticize it. But if you have your customers in your hand social media can mean massive publicity with minimal efforts to keep it going as the ‘user’ does it for you. Companies need to change their way of thinking and move from a push method where a marketer controls the brand to an interaction model with the crowd.

If your company is into B2B, things become a bit cloudy. B2B products don’t need to reach a massive amount of users (otherwise you would be selling a consumer product) as most of them have nothing to do with the product itself but you want to reach your potential clients which are other companies, but they are still people who could be using various social media platforms and interact with other potential customers for your B2B product(s). In those cases opening a Facebook page can be less effective than for consumer based products but LinkedIn is always useful to network digitally with other corporate people. (the latter also goes for B2C companies of course). But things are evolving… A lot of networking today is also done via social media websites like Facebook, twitter etc. where the line between personal and professional lives seem to fade to nothing. People talk to their friends but also their associates, colleagues or even their competitors thru the same channels. This means, maybe that Facebook page could be useful after all.

Social media seems fairly specially for smaller businesses that don’t have the big to spend on being on top of the latest evolutions advertisement and marketing. But even those companies should look into how this could benefit them because websites like YouTube(2005), Facebook(2007) , LinkedIn(2003) and Twitter(2006) to name a few are only a couple of years old but booming big. And as for all things evolving over the last few years there were pro and cons for ‘social media’ some saying it’s only a hype and it will die when the first excitement is over. If that is going to happen, it’s definitely not going to happen soon and personally I doubt it ever will.
Social media is here and here to stay but I do believe it will evolve in one way or the other and in a few years the digital landscape will look totally different from now.

But that’s also a reason why I love it so much ..