Earlier this week Smartcompany released the results of their 2012 business technology survey. One of the things that stood out was less than 30% of businesses are happy with their online results.
Almost certainly this is because most businesses diving into social media are doing it for marketing or advertising reasons – so they expect to make sales shortly after they start posting updates.
While social media can be a good marketing tool, it’s almost always time intensive and often it doesn’t work at all.
For most businesses social media is much more useful as a market intelligence tool or a communications channel.
Talking to your customers and helping them with their problems is probably the thing social media does best.
While it can be argued that good customer support is the best way to build a brand and market a business, that’s a major change in thinking for many organisations.
If you think social media is all about marketing – or customer support isn’t about your business brand – then you’re doing it wrong.