After Facebook and Twitter became popular in the world, not only individuals but also companies started to take interest in social media. In the early years, being on social media was a positive thing for a company's reputation. Newspapers started tweeting their news, and some blogs posted their content on social media. Even Starbucks shared photos of instant coffee. Actually, all of this was meant to say I exist on social media.
After a while, companies saw that they could transform the relationship between fans and followers into direct marketing activity. And some went one step further and tried to sell their products on social media. Some companies took the business even further and started providing customer service via social media.
Nowadays, we can gather these activities under 3 headings based on approach. Each of these 3 titles needs a different perspective and management style.
Brand Management on Social Media
To create brand awareness, you need to focus on reputation, branding, loyalty and credibility. With this approach, you can organize some online activities and events. For example, your company may have a foundation and you can share the activities performed by this foundation through your social media account. Another thing you can do is organize an event and give some background information about it. This will help to interact with participants or potentials. In addition, your company needs to be involved in interactive dialogue with phenomena. This job alone requires both courage and extreme care. Below are some good examples of this.
If the dialogues are as clever as the above, they will be shared, re-tweeted and will serve as an example for some articles as in this post. These types of interactions will also help you gain positive feedback and increase your brand value. This effect is doubled if your target audience is between the ages of 15-45. However, if your goal is different from this range, your social media activities will not come back to you as expected.
Advertising and Sales on Social Media
Basically, there are two types of sales activities that you can use. One is direct selling. The other is indirect sales that you will make by triggering the customer through demand creation or coupon code, etc.
Most used for direct selling application, e-book, e-commerce products. For this, after you have clearly created your target audience on the advertising platform offered by social media - there are incredibly beautiful options here - you can bring your target audience out of 12. Sometimes this can be between two tweets and sometimes an Instagram post if the Facebook wall is not. So, with a single click, you will be directed to the App Store or Play Store to purchase the app.
As I mentioned above, social media is mostly used by people aged 15-45 (although Facebook has made significant progress in the 60+ area lately). If your products are not available to people in this group, you should reevaluate your ROI expectation on social media.
Customer Service and Customer Management Through Social Media
When we talk about providing customer service on social media, we need to think about customer management as well. Both terms are very close to each other these days and it is one of the areas to be very careful and sensitive.
Even if you don't provide Customer service on Social Media, you need to manage - at least - negative voices in social media for your advertising, marketing and reputation.
The main rule of social media customer service; It is the requirement that you treat your customers sincerely with a balanced courtesy. Unfortunately, most of the interaction on social media consists of complaints. The rest are suggestions, feedback or information. In this case, you should rearrange your CRM system to follow your customer's social media accounts in order to hear your customer's voice better and manage his future behavior.
After receiving a complaint, you must first decide whether you can resolve it in a short time. If you can solve it quickly, write the answer directly, if the answer contains personal data, inform your customer that you will call back in a few minutes by direct message method or request the time to call him. In this communication, you can use OTP (One-time password) authentication when required. OTP may only be required for sensitive data shares. Although the expected solution takes some time, inform your customer regularly.
So what to do if you are facing a social media attack, let me explain this with an example. Let's say you are the social media managing director of a leading commercial bank.