Users want to feel confident in knowing that the company they are doing business with places value on customers, not just their spending habits. Back in the “good ol days”, as my grandfather used to call it, people spent time developing and fostering relationships with salespeople long before they ever made an actual purchase. Those relationships typically led to people staying loyal to one brand or another because they came to rely on people like my grandfather and his knowledge of products and how those products could help solve a problem for the customer. As they say, what goes around, eventually comes back around and I believe what we’re seeing in terms of social media is an extension of those good ol’ days; people are relying on social media and social signals to help them make an informed purchase decision.

While the desired result might be growing your business and increasing revenue, you need to figure out how to best connect with your users/clients/customers. Rather than take a shotgun approach and spraying every possible social media channel 42 times a day, we can help you review those sites that your users are most active on, where the focus should be and establish the right mix of social channels to best leverage your efforts in building your brand. Once the research has been done and the focus established, we develop some strategy around the best ways to communicate your message through these channels.

Search engines now use social media to rank sites, and they give preference for sites with content that engages users. So you have your users who are looking to be engaged and search engines trying to identify the sites that do the best job at engaging customers and are rewarding those sites for their efforts.

Since users have turned to social media to help shape their perceptions of the brands and companies they’re thinking about interacting with, social channels are providing users the opportunity to leave comments, ratings and reviews. Whether the comments, ratings or reviews are positive or negative, this creates an opportunity for brands to reach out and initiate a conversation, answer questions and provide customer service solutions.

While Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn jump out as the front-runners for running ads, there are a bunch of other social media sites that have smaller, more niche communities that might be worth getting participating in. Much like developing the social media strategy, management and user engagement plan-o-attack, developing a good framework for who your customers/clients/users are goes a long way in reviewing which sites are going to produce the greatest ROI. We can help research and review, as well as develop and manage your social media campaigns in a similar fashion to our SEM / Search Engine Marketing process and services.