Social Media Is More Than Just Marketing

In any company, the debate rages: what department “owns” social media? Should marketing so they can talk about new products and promotions? Should PR so they can push out company news and information? Or how about the contact center, aka “customer service” or “customer care,” so questions and complaints can be addressed?

Regardless of which department controls social media in your company, one thing is clear: if you don’t engage with your audience and share content that’s important to them, you won’t have an audience. Period. And there’s nothing worse than not having an audience, right?

Wrong. With the speed of social media, information about you or your company, ranging in length anywhere from a 140-character tweet to a video a multi-page blog post, can quickly go viral. If the information is positive, then there’s nothing to worry about. But if it’s negative, then it can quickly become a disaster, especially if you don’t address the issue until it’s too late.

It starts with listening, and not just listening to people on the social media channels that you’ve created. With more than 140 million active users and 340 million daily tweets, Twitter, which just celebrated its sixth birthday, is significantly larger than your @CompanyName handle. The daily number of users and interactions skyrockets into the billions when you take other media into consideration.

Social media monitoring tools allow you to monitor websites for mentions of your company name, product names, leadership team and desired keywords. By actively listening, you can not only respond in real time to hot issues but also provide customer service and create a community for your customers. It’s a winning situation for any company.

At the end of the day, do you know what people are saying about you?