Social Media for All

Social media is a novel media for communication and collaboration, enabled via Internet.
With the explosion of web 2.0 and social networking, there’s been a massive increase in people spending time socializing on Internet. Be it about making friends or about mounting a Business, or even for the sake of generating awareness for a nonprofit, social media has become indispensable.
Being a part of the social media software practice group in iLabs, I have found how social media has created an impact into various domains. Based on my understanding, there exists innovative, yet rudimentary, ways through which Social media tools can create a difference in following areas:

• Online Marketing and Branding

The key for any successful business wouldn’t be the number of people you start with but the number of people you spread to. Social Media helps you to achieve this via “viral marketing”, also referred as potential of “pass-it-on” where you tell your friend, your friend to his friend and so on resulting in an exponential growth. Man being a social animal listens to his acquaintance first as compared to an unknown advertisement.
So, if I as a user started using a wonderful site which helps me to take care of my finances, I will be happy to “pass-it-on” to my 200 friends on Facebook, who might do the same with their own friends.
Technically, there exist several options, which can enable your site to hook with other networks and post updates there.
On Similar lines, business can also use such networks for building their brand. Facebook pages, Twitter updates are few such means to showcase your business to the millions of users who exist on these sites.

Several web giants are already leveraging this, and others are in process. This medium has outwardly surpassed the traditional advertising model, bringing down the overall cost and time to implement marketing.

• Customer Engagement, Networking and Advocacy

Think on these lines, from a customer’s perspective:

• I wish the site could offer me online, real time assistance?
• I want to know and learn from other user’s experiences on this product.
• Recommend me products based on my preferences and usage.
• Allow me to share feedbacks and provide me remedies.
• Why do I need to make a profile, register and remembering a new set of credentials? Instead, can I use Facebook credentials, directly and login?

Web 2.0 and social media is all about improving the user experience, by inserting dynamic tools for interaction and engagement.
Social networking, community building, blogs, wikis, forums, one- one chat, comments tracking are some examples which demonstrates how social media can help to increase the user stickiness, thus retaining them for long.

• Product Research, User Analysis and Business Intelligence

The ROI of social media can be measured by tracking the users and their activities. If the site traffic increased with high retention rate of customers, social media is showing its returns. Similarly, if the social data created by the users of your community or the third party sites, is captured correctly, business can achieve huge benefits. You can find the most popular products and its targeted users, track the most connected and/or influential users, visualize latest user activities, navigate through the social graph or discover top discussed forums and Blogs.
This information can be further used to strategize powerful sales and marketing philosophy of Businesses by focusing on products and individuals, who really COUNTS.