M3/D3

Benefits of Social Media

Improved sales

Large companies run competitions to get publicity all the time, there as so many advantages. This is good way for George to get his name out there and get lots of publicity. By starting some form of competition he will attract lots of attention, and introduce and encourage new customers from the aria. Him being online is an ideal place for giving his followers free ads about deals and competitions that he has set up.

An example of this is Dell in 2009 managed to track $3 million of their sales due to twitter alone. They claim it all started in 2007 when they started to be more active on social media, and give there followers information about upcoming products and handing out coupons, and out of the $3 million worth of sails Twitter got nothing from it.(2)

Better information

It's easy to give out small tidbits of information such as recalls and opening times, rather than updating their website. Because it's easier and likely to be see by a large mass of people, the more people will be informed. Companies that lack on publishing essential information may mislead loil customers and will make a dent in your profits.

Improved feedback

Social sites like Twitter and Facebook offer a simple and easy way to help customers out with and gather information from them. Having a good communication is great for a company's reputation. If the company's blank customers and don't listen to what they want then they are destined to fail.

Business functions

Human Resources(HR)

Human Resources can put out posts and requirements of what they want for future staff members. By putting it on social media it has the potential to spread fast, and have not of people apply giving more choices for staff members.

Part of HR's job is to keep staff motivated, but a problem would be communicating to specific multitude of people. So by using social media it can help spread the word of staff discounts or other upgrades to help out the workplace motivations.

Addressing issues is one of the hardest things HR have to do this includes suspending and firing people for different reasons. And unfortunately for staff members this doue mean that you need to be careful what you post on your social media. For example if you post about how much you hate your colleague and use racial slurs, and HR is reported about this, then they will have to act accordingly.

Marketing

Ability to target customers with the ability to talk to such a community give the company to see what people are into and what they want. Then when they see popular trends and what people wanting, they can send out discounts and deals, some times exclusive to people who have liked or followed them on social media.

Receive feedback to new concepts, when a company is planning to make a big change or doing something that will affect the customer, then is always a good idea to give your customers a heads up about what's to come, that way people can have their say.  

Improve customer retention/loyalty, as a business owner your main aim is to keep your customers attracted to your store and never give them a reason to make a purchase from your competitors. To do this you will need to make them feel welcome and make it a more personal experience to shop in your shop or buy your product. If you look at a lot of modern day advertising they have moved to showing families enjoying food together rather that trying to make it look over the top fancy.

Improved Brand awareness/loyalty, when a company makes a name for itself it can either be good bad. Assuming that you have good and loyal customers that praise your business, you want to keep that going as long as possible. But if you ignore or do something that your customers don't like your more than likely going  to lose some of those loyalty, and potentially give your company a bad name.

Sales

Better market/customers awareness, if your community don't know about what's going on with your business and you for example have set up a special event to attract current and potential customers but there is hardly any advertising for it. Then you are going to get a lot less customers checking out your business. But with the use of sole mida you can send and post invites to your event encouraging more people to come.

Customer engagement through social data. A popular thing to make the community feel more evolved with the company there buying from. Is for the company to set up a competition for something, a common one is to come up with your own flavor and send it in, the best one will become the new product. An example of this would be Walkers crisps in 2014 gave a customer £1 Million pounds for coming up with the flavor "pulled pork in a sticky barbecue sauce"

Customer communities and support, all companies big and small use sites like Facebook to communicate and help their customers with any issues they have. All companies agree that if you want your opinion to be seen then the best way to do that is to send it over sohal media. Some companies will even reply within an hour of posting your message.

Customer Service

Ease of access to customer data/history when people follow like or subscribe, you will be able to see what kind of people are watching or liking your product. These stats show what the average age of your customers, there sex and many more, from this you can see what people like and what you need to do more of.

Speed of response, large companies will reply to customers within the hour of your message being posted, but they can not answer them all due to there being millions of comments being posed an hour. But what most large and small companies will read as many of the comments as possible and then reply to the top and most liked comments.

Improved customer service if you don't have a good customer service and a customer needs help but can't get it, there is a good chance that they will leave a bad review, then the butterfly effect will take place. Because more people will likely post more bad reviews, and the more bad reviews the less customers. But using social sites will help you filter through people's thoughts and help anyone that needs it. The most common question is most likely to be the most liked.

Product/Service Innovation

Wider resources for development, once you have created your business, you will need to keep expanding on it to keep it up to date so you stay in the social media world competing with other innovative companies.

Faster Time to market, sometimes companies need to get a message out to people as fast as possible, the reason is because of danger, new product launch or an announcement. For instance Samsung recalled there S7 Note for safety reasons.
So the message went globle into the wider market place, and samsung where able to share data about the reasons for the recall.

links

(1)http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2010/09/21/evidence-that-social-media-really-does-drive-sales/
(2)http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/dell-has-earned-3-million-from-twitter/?_r=0