Engaging Customers with Social Media Increases Revenues

If you don’t embrace social media and the marketing potential that exists, you are going to be left in the “old economy,” I truly believe in only 5 years you are going to see a shift in the landscape of the Fortune 500. So many of the old dinosaurs just aren’t meeting our needs any more. Think about it, you need to treat all of your customers like gold, all the time, if you don’t they’ll blog and tweet their experience to their network of followers. The bar is so much higher today! When I want to go out for for Mexican or Indian food, where do I go? The Yellow Pages? newspaper? monthly community magazine? No, I go to Yelp or UrbanSpoon. And that is the change many companies just don’t get! I’ve actually Googled a local restaurant and they didn’t even have a webpage! So the only comments I saw about the restaurant were on Yelp, and they weren’t positive! Did I go? Absolutely not! As large and small businesses, how are you being viewed? You can control your YellowPages ad, but you can’t control your online reputation (without forethought and an internet marketing strategy).

I just read Engagementdb’s “The world’s most valuable brands Who’s most engaged?” report (you can download it for free here), and it was very insightful. LinkedIn and Harris Interactive should probably read that report.

Here are some of the Key Takeaways I think are important: The report says there is a direct correlation between companies that are deeply engaged and those those who outperform their peers. They go on to say that companeis that are both deeply and widely engaged in social media surpass their peers in terms of both revenue and profit performance. In fact, they are showing sustained revenue and margin growth in spite of the current economy. The report continues with some best practices from Starbucks, Dell, Toyota, and SAP.

How can you engage your customers with Social Media? Get a blog, Facebook page and Twitter account and start engaging them! Answer their questions, comment on their blog responses; by keeping the dialogue open, you will earn their trust and respect.

Jeff Russell