The Lesser-Known Uses of Organic Social Media
Kanyen Sherwood
Marketing and Sales Coordinator | Experienced with Digital, Brand, and Content Marketing
Great organic social media seems to be at the top of every company's wish list these days. Having a large following offers an unrivaled platform to directly reach your audience. Everyone knows that this platform is the perfect place to raise awareness and build your brand, but there are many other uses that are just as important. Let’s take a look at two of these lesser-known uses of organic social media: customer service and social listening.
A brief introduction to organic media
An organic media strategy involves creating custom posts on social media that highlight your business. There are many different strategies available, but creating a customer persona is a great place to start figuring out how best to build a relationship with your audience. Paid media can help attract new customers, but organic media is the one that ultimately makes them convert. You can read more about the differences between organic and paid media here.
Customer Service:
Now more than ever, people like to complain on social media. According to Statista, 33% of people in the US say they have used social media to complain about a brand in 2020 alone. If they have a problem with your brand, they will post about it. Whether they tagged your business or just mentioned the name, using the official account to respond to their concerns within 24 hours can raise customer loyalty by up to 50%.?
Not only does this help solve that customer's problem as quickly as possible, but it also shows others that your brand is willing to help. The nature of social media allows a large number of people to see how you are helping one person who has a problem. To those people that saw your response, your brand now seems more open to helping. Next time they have an issue, they will be more likely to reach out to fix the problem instead of switching to a different brand.
Social Listening:
Companies pay good money to do market research about their product. Surveys, focus groups, and online reviews are all places where a business looks to find information about how consumers feel about its product. Another cheap place to find exactly what consumers think is social media. People will respond to news about your business, controversies, updates, sales, and many other events. There are many different tools that marketers can use to sort through this data and aggregate it in an easy-to-view format, such as Sprout Social.?
Another huge value of social listening is idea creation. People who use your product every day are more likely to have an idea of how to improve it. Not only do consumers go to social media to complain, but they will also go to social media to suggest improvements to the product. Finding which ideas are good and which are not is up to you, but you have to gather the data first. This data is already out there, you just have to go find it.
Social media has a huge amount of hidden value that often gets missed. Having a great organic strategy is not just about increasing followers, but is about creating a deeper connection with your customers. If your business does not have an organic social media strategy, the best time to start is now.