Social Media Marketing: Business Challenges & Opportunities

1. Social Media Marketing
Business Challenges & Opportunities
Seyed Ziae Mousavi Mojab
These days, everyone talks about Social Media. Social Media is now the primary source of information,
and a key resource for communication. Facebook has more than 1 billion registered users, and each day
around 500 million tweets are sent out. People use Social Media not only to build inter-personal
relationships, but also to learn about consumer products and to read consumer feedbacks. Many
business owners, also use Social Media to attract and engage new customers. Effective use of Social
Media can in fact, bring great opportunities for many businesses.
While Social Media marketing looks simple, and effective, a wrong Social Media strategy can end up
damaging both customer satisfaction, and brand reputation in the market. The question; however, is
how you should approach Social Media marketing?
The first and major challenge, in Social Media projects, is to provide the company a good understanding
of Social Media space, and clearly demonstrate the Social Media opportunities and the business real
needs. A company’s reputation can no longer be controlled from inside the company. With the
emergence of Social Media, maintaining a favorable online reputation has become an increasingly
challenging task. On Social Media, people can say anything about your business, both good and bad, and
you need to know how to handle these negative and positive feedbacks. Therefore, before starting a
Social Media project, all the gray areas must be discussed and resolved with the management to secure
enough internal resources, and develop a comprehensive Social Media strategy. The benefits and
consequences must be explained, and opportunities and challenges must be evaluated.
Next, develop a project plan. Set you goals, audience, and platforms. Select the appropriate measures,
and outline the content, benefits and requirements. And finally specify your marketing team’s
responsibilities.
To start with Social Media marketing, find an active playground on a Social Media website (such as
Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, etc.), and find your playmates. Then, you
may need to define some rules for your game before getting involved. Watch your playmates, and try to
listen and get the messages. And then find the right time to get started.
The easiest way to search and monitor Social Media websites, is to use free Social Media listening and
monitoring tools such as Google Alert, HootSuite, Ice Rocket, Social mention, and Topsy. Or you can use
a professional tool such as Radian6 from SalesForce to “quickly and effectively track, monitor, and react
to comments, questions, and complaints as they happen (SalesForce.com).” Using these monitoring
tools, you can search for your brand name, products, competitors, potential customers, etc., get

2. engaged and generate substantive reports.
Source: SaleForce.com
Now, you can drive revenue by generating and sharing the right content that drives traffic to your
website, or you can find customers that have the potential of being converted. By monitoring Social
Media, you can generate more leads through improving the customers’ overall satisfaction, and trust.
Social Media marketing, in fact, is a long term commitment, where the company will engage in online
discussions and conversations without trying to control them. The corporate will carefully listen to the
communities, and earnestly share its views. It will respond to the reviews whether positive or negative,
and will try to learn about issues, and needs related to the company, competitors and the industry in
general. You may need to know what other people are saying about your company, and your products.
What has concerned your target group of customers? And what are their views and needs? Who are the
leaders / influencers in the conversations? And what do competitors do in the market?
At the end, like in many other projects, try to adjust your Social Media marketing plan, optimize the
actions based on reports and measures and set your new strategic goals. While Social Media gives you
an incredible opportunity to build brand awareness and drive website traffic it's important to remember
that your Social Media presence can have serious repercussions, if your marketing plan is not well
designed and well implemented.
Keywords: Social Media Marketing (SMM), Brand awareness, Customer satisfaction, On-line
engagement, Generating revenue, Business challenges and opportunities, Inbound Information
Technology