Social Media Customer Relationship Management Recommendations

Many enterprises expect to pass

Close to customers is the most important task for enterprises. The current enterprises are keen to do this through social media planning.

But are customers equally enthusiastic about it? Rather, most customers do not keep in touch with businesses through social media, and they are more focused on reality.

Nowadays, customer activities in social media or social networking sites are becoming more and more virtualized. In this environment of customer control and two-way communication, customers and enterprises do not keep pace with their expectations.

To succeed in giving full play to the potential of social media, businesses need

Rapid development and application status

Let's take a look at the speed of consumers and enterprises accepting social media.

In 2010, the number of social media users was astonishing.

The number of active users of Facebook is as high as more than 500 million, of which 70% comes from outside the United States.

By March 2010, since the launch of micro-blog in 2006, the number of messages sent by micro-blog has exceeded 10 billion.

In July of this year, this figure doubled to 20 billion.

In the Asia Pacific region, only 50% of Internet users visited social networking sites in February 2010, and the total number of visitors reached 240 million 300 thousand.

Enterprises have a personal understanding of the phenomenon of globalized social media and feel tremendous pressure.

Obviously, social media is a place for customers to assemble and enterprises to enter.

Social media has unlimited potential for enterprises to reach customers. Through social media, enterprises are expected to increase revenue, reduce costs and improve efficiency.

As expected, our findings indicate that companies have launched social media initiatives.

Nearly 70% of executives said that if their companies did not participate, they would be abandoned, and more than half believed that their competitors were winning customers through social media.

Although consumers are highly receptivity to social networking sites, businesses need to understand that these figures may not be reliable.

Our survey shows that only a small number of consumers (5%) almost always respond to others' comments or post their own posts. The largest group (75%) is the occasional participant, while the silent observer (20%) is only observed on the side.

Innovative enterprises should identify the authors who are constantly involved and use their influence to brand communication.

For most consumers, social media is a way to keep in touch with friends and family members, to understand news and entertainment, rather than to interact with brands.

Companies need to understand that less than half of customers are likely to interact with them in social media environments.

Of course, for a specific industry or business type of target market, this figure may fluctuate.

For enterprises, the real opportunity is to attract people who are unwilling to participate.

Enterprises need to work hard to communicate with these customers openly and honestly, understand what they value most, and provide them with benefits to attract them to take action.

The gap between cognition and reality

The use of social media as a channel to attract customers poses a great challenge to the traditional CRM concept.

CRM strategy is supported by process and technology. Its purpose is to manage customer relationship and maximize value from the whole customer life cycle.

These strategies generally focus on the operational responsiveness required by customer management.

However, when using social media, enterprises no longer have control over customer relationship.

Enterprises need to seize this change opportunity with the new strategy, namely social CRM. The idea is that enterprises should abandon the practice of managing customers and replace them to promote collaborative experience and dialogues that customers value.

Knowing what the customer values most in the unique environment of the social platform is the key first step in formulating the social CRM strategy.

The results of our survey may be beyond their expectation for companies that think consumers are connected to maintain their brand concerns.

In fact, consumers are more interested in getting tangible value, which means that enterprises may confuse their expectations of customers' affinity and their willingness to communicate with consumers.

65% of the enterprises regard social media as a new source of revenue, but at the same time, many companies believe that getting discounts and coupons and buying products or services are the most important reasons why customers are concerned about enterprises on social networking sites.

Ironically, consumers' real value is the primary reason for their interaction with enterprises, which is good news for companies wishing to make profits through social media.

Consumers list the "reviews reviews and product rankings" in third place, which is the product information before customers decide to interact, which is part of the purchase process.

If consumers think they are good, feel that they can trust the business, and make sure that social media is the right channel to ensure that they get the desired value, they are willing to interact with the enterprise.

This form of value may be coupons or specific information.

Maintaining social interaction with enterprises may lead to a sense of belonging to the consumers (which is an intangible benefit of emotion), but the hope of intimacy is not a driving force.

It is hoped that enterprises who maintain closer ties with customers through social media dialogue may erroneously predict the role of intimacy in customer interaction motivation.

Unlike business interaction and interaction with friends, most consumers are not active brand advocates. They maintain contact with enterprises mainly in order to keep in touch with brand communities.

Enterprises believe that social media interaction will enhance customer loyalty.

However, many customers say that they need to be loyal to the enterprise before they participate in the interaction. They also have different views on how influential these interactions will be.

In the 2010 IBM global CEO survey, 88% of CEO said that in the next five years, "close to customers" is the most concern of enterprises.

This impetus has also been reflected in this survey.

Nearly 3/4 (70%) of respondents believe that obtaining customers through social media will help improve customer support.

However, consumers have different opinions on this issue.

Only 38% of consumers believed that interaction with social media would significantly affect their loyalty to enterprises, 28% of them maintained a neutral attitude, while 33% of consumers said that they could not feel more loyal to enterprises through interaction with social media through social media.

In addition, consumers have different views on whether social media interaction can affect consumers' consumption of enterprise products.

Less than half of the consumers (49%) thought that after participating in the interaction, they might buy the products of the enterprise, 27% of the consumers thought that the social media interaction would not affect their expenditure, while 24% of them would be neutral.

In addition, nearly 2/3 of consumers say that enthusiasm for brands or enterprises is a prerequisite for interaction with social media through social media.

This means that most consumers may only interact with brands they already know and love.

In other words, consumers who interact with each other have established intimacy with the brand or enterprise, and participation by social media alone does not necessarily enhance loyalty or increase spending.

Social CRM recommendations

Companies need to consider carefully how to create a unique social media experience of their own brands, to provide value to customers and to make use of the powerful capabilities of social communities.

To successfully launch a social media plan that helps change customer relationships, companies need to do the following.

Recognizing that social media is the power to change the rules of the game.

We believe that for many enterprises, social media will become gateways, or even the main channels of communication with customers.

When designing social media programs, they need to take a unified view and take full account of other situations that customers and enterprises are exposed to.

Make clear the difference between social media and other channels.

The purpose of social CRM is to achieve customer participation and bring benefits to both customers and enterprises.

The traditional customer relationship management mode should be adapted to the reality of customer control.

Create seamless customer experience across social media and other channels.

If you know that customers are in a channel, you need to know that he is in other channels too.

This means that social solutions should not be designed as isolated plans, but need to be integrated with other client oriented initiatives.

Start from the perspective of customers.

Do not ask why your business needs to participate in social media, but ask why customers choose to interact with your business on social platforms.

Change the social interaction strategy, focus on providing customers with the value they seek, so that customers can maintain intimacy with you.

If you are not sure what the customer value is, ask the customer.

Dialogue and participation are the functions of social media. Enterprises need to design innovative ways to get customers' opinion of you through voting, stimulating ideas and questions, allowing customers to vote through their favorite ideas or innovations.

In fact, letting customers invest in results will help build the brand and brand you seek.

Benefit from social media.

Enterprises should enable customers to experience social media quickly and easily, so that they can directly deal with businesses.

Enterprises should also develop social business activities, using time sensitive offers or discounts to stimulate specific customers to take action.

The content of social media must be fresh and relevant if we want to involve customers and become repeat customers.

At the same time, enterprises should reward customers who share their content with their friends, so as to achieve the advantage of virus spread in the community platform.

Companies eager to get close to customers have set up Web pages, videos and micro-blog on social networking sites.

However, if these enterprises do not care about the real value of the vast majority of customers, they may miss opportunities.

In fact, for the 75% "occasional participants" who need a reasonable reason to participate in interaction, providing them with tangible value may be the most attractive force.