It has become clear that social media is here to stay. With that in mind, you have to think about what you can do to get in touch with people in a sensible and controlled manner.
Part of this includes knowing how to manage social media to improve your business intelligence. Your business intelligence is a clear measurement of how well it can function. This comes from how it can analyze data and get the information needed to keep it running.
There are many things that can be done as a means of making social media more appealing for your planning needs. Social media is making it easier for businesses to stay functional, as you will notice here.
Identify Your Audience
The demographics of your social media followers will clearly vary. You might have a younger audience than a competitor, for instance.
Social media will impact business intelligence by helping businesses to identify the trends that are going along within an industry. This in turn makes it easier for a business to thrive and grow as you understand who it is that you are trying to target. More importantly, it lets businesses figure out who is ripe for marketing purposes.
Take a look at the demographics of your followers and see if your business is actually targeting them. This in turn can help you figure out what you might need to use at a certain point.
Be Personal
Business intelligence is often reflected in how businesses are able to interact with others. In many cases this can include how questions are answered.
Social media makes it easier for a business to get in touch with other people. For instance:
- Social media allows businesses to ask questions to people.
- It also lets businesses answer any problems or concerns that customers hold.
- It gives people updates on what a business is doing.
- A business can simply use social media to thank its customers for their business.
Social media will force businesses into being more direct while online. More importantly, it shows customers that a business cares about its customers. You can definitely use social media if you want to improve your sales enablement plans. It makes people think that you are invested in them.
A great example of how being personal can make a difference comes from what IBM has done for its sales enablement needs. IBM has encouraged its employees to get on social media and to interact with customers. This includes careful and organized insight from employees on a variety of topics relating to what IBM has to offer.
Cutting Defections
Social media makes it easier for defections to take place. People can vent their frustrations about businesses online and encourage others to stay away.
Businesses can review trends on social media that may result in defections and find ways to address those problems before they can become worse. They can especially look to see what kind of problems have come about in recent time. These include problems where a competitor might have a more inviting product or someone might want to switch to another entity.
The telecommunications firm T-Mobile has particularly been using social media interactions and other methods of interaction as a means of figuring out which customers may be more likely to defect to other telecom providers. This helps the business to figure out what they can do as means of keeping those clients. With this in mind, T-Mobile has been able to significantly reduce the number of defections that it has gotten in recent time.
Analyze Trends
Your business intelligence can improve when you focus on how social media trends can change what might occur within your business. You can analyze trends relating to what people might be saying in real time and if the information being gathered through social media will be more interesting.
For instance, in 2011 the US Geologic Survey noticed that regular Twitter users were faster at reporting data on an earthquake that occurred in Virginia than anyone else.
This led the US Geologic Survey into looking to see how data trends on social media sites can be used to improve how it reports and distributes information. This can add a substantial impact on how data is to be relayed in real time. More importantly, the Survey will become more intelligent as it can find information faster.
Another example comes from how GE uses social media trends to identify power outages in areas that it offers energy services to. It works with geotagged social media messages to identify where power outages can be. This allows GE to zero in on where problem sites might be. It makes GE more intelligent as it can target problems it comes about in less time.
Don’t be afraid to check the social media world to see how your business intelligence plans could be changed. This could help you out in many ways. It’s all about giving your business more information while having an easier time responding to whatever data might come about over time. This especially helps you to get more sales.