How are Businesses Using Social Networks?

Social Networks are very useful for businesses, because they can be used for advertising of business on it (Linda Roeder. November 12, 2007).

Companies have an opportunity to create profiles and write information on their profile pages. So when companies` clients, customers or vendors need information about the company, they can simply check profile page and see it; they shouldn’t spend time making calls or sending emails and waiting for response.

We should also mention that social networking sites are a great way to inform employees on what’s going on in the company. Companies have an opportunity to send group emails to all their employees at once or write news on the blog (Linda Roeder. May 25, 2007).

Social-media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and a lot of other sites, have made a great effect on how millions of Americans, especially young ones, cooperate with others, shop and view brands. Such sites area is a real-time digital lifestyle influenced by smartphones and netbooks.

Marketers have paid attention to this. Social-networking services indeed are required business tools. According to Forrester Research survey of 1,217 business decision makers all over the world last year, 95% use social networks somewhat. And 53% of 300 marketers were planning to enlarge social-media marketing spending in the nearest time.

Twitter has about 40 million users who create a big amount of tweets. Users of this site spend more than 300 million minutes on the site per month.

Just now, consumers don’t search for services and products. Better even to say that services come to their attention using social media, says Erik Qualman, the author of Socialnomics, the book in which author explains how companies do business and how they use social sites (Use social networking to reach customers. August 27, 2009).

Social-networking businesses help social-media clients to:

ӢAdd customers quickly.

“Social (media) is one of the key trends driving our business,” says Kira Wampler, social-media marketing leader at Intuit. “It’s more than pure marketing. It’s about fast connections with customers and building an ongoing relationship.” (Use social networking to reach customers. August 27, 2009).

Famous pizza company Papa John‘s added 148,000 fans in November through marketing activity on Facebook.

The company offered a free pizza to everyone who signed up as their fans on Facebook. Such promotion gathered several thousands of users and drove its traffic on Web up to 253%. Just now this company has more than 300,000 fans and plans to have 1 million fans at the end of this year.

ӢWord-of-mouth marketing. Best advocates of companies are their customers sometimes. Such companies as Best Buy and MyFICO, built special online communities where their clients could freely evaluate products and services.

According to a recent survey of 25,000 people held by Nielsen, nine of 10 customers, trust their peers more than marketers.

ӢEnhance customer service. The company Comcast has used Twitter more than for a year, to talk directly to customers. The Twitter page of the company has 28,000 followers.

The company Lenovo had got 20% less calls to their call-center in the USA during six months because nearly 50,000 clients checked the community website, reading information about laptops.

ӢSpeak directly to customers. Such sites as Twitter, Facebook or Blogs, can be an perfect forum for CEOs to offer users a wanted viewpoint (Use social networking to reach customers. August 27, 2009).

Here are some interesting facts:

Facebook : Over 10,000 websites use Facebook Connect, the service that allows users of Facebook to log in to adjacent sites using their Facebook profiles and wrack information from those sites with their friends on Facebook.

Twitter: Twitter users spend about 66% more dollars on the Internet than those who don’t use twitter (according to market researcher ComScore).

LinkedIn: This site has over 365,000 profiles of companies. And more than 12 million small-business professionals are members of the site.

MySpace: Over 1 million people and small companies advertise their services and goods on the site (Use social networking to reach customers. August 27, 2009).

Social networking sites have become am important part of people’s life. People use networks to keep in touch with friends, share views, meet new people, find jobs, establish business contacts and just enjoy time communicating. Companies use such sites in order to advertise their goods and services, become closer to customers.