seager consulting

Social media: assessing the benefits

Is social media the right channel for you? Here’s a quick look at the steps you can ensure you make the right move into exploiting social media opportunities.

Most brands with an online presence are now aware of the potential of social media and are making moves to exploit this growing channel. here’s an insight into the strategic planning process to help you negotiate social media opportunities.

Step 1: Identify your business goals that drive your growth and development. This requires identifying and clarifying such goals as increasing profitability, decreasing churn rates or increase repeat business.

Step 2: Identify the organisational functions responsible involved with these goals. This could be customer support or service, marketing and sales or manufacturing.

Step 3: Investigate the social media initiatives that could contribute to the business goals of these functions. Maintaining a corporate Facebook page to serve as a corporate marketing and recruiting tool? Creating a competitor monitoring system to track online competitor activities, and so on.

Step 4: Assess the potential benefits of all social media opportunities. Ask key questions such as what is the cost? what are the specific benefits? (e.g., revenue enhancement, cost reduction, improved public image, improved staff morale, improved innovation, etc.).

Step 5: Categorise the impacted function(s) in terms of priority, budget, schedule, existing systems, sales, marketing and production processes.

Step 6: Tabulate the findings and calculate your return on investment.

From these 6 steps, you can decide which social media channel contributes best to your growth strategy.

Once the findings are in, you can begin more detailed review and planning of the specific strategies to help you drive growth.

Contact me on +31 (0)6 411 892 03 or email me at info@seagerconsulting.com to find out more about the growth applications of social media.