Business owners have begun to understand the potential of social media engagement for generating additional sales. On the social media, prospects leave crucial pieces of information that can be useful in generating new leads.
But the unfortunate aspect is companies often lack the right tools to succeed in social media marketing. You need an effective framework with which to purposefully convert the mass of user-generated content
You must develop a strong capacity to ably manage your social space and extract useful insights from the voluminous data created on social media. By successfully leveraging social media for your products / brand, you will be able to induce positive word of mouth sales. You can develop your consumers to serve as brand advocates; increase sales and generate a higher return on investment.
You can follow a four-step framework that will enable companies belonging to any industrial sector to extract valuable and relevant information from the vast quantum of data that social media generates. The four step framework can be aptly called the SELI (Scan, Engage, Learn and Internalize) framework.
Before you commence operating SELI specify your business objective. Before applying the framework and engaging with consumers on social networks, you should specify a business objective underlying the conversation with the consumer. The objective may be – increasing brand awareness, brand loyalty and engagement, intelligence gathering, or new product development.
By using an integrated polling tool that allowed users to freely comment on, and vote for your different products, you can build customer interest in the brand.
- You should actively monitor and track user-generated content — the conversations that are happening on both their own and competitors’ social media pages — to help identify emerging trends.
- Engage with customers on social networks to enhance external knowledge inflows. You should engage and create a dialogue with consumers based on the insights developed by scanning the social media space.
- It s necessary to learn from engagement with consumers. Learning occurs through an integration which the company uses polls, conversation threads and open-ended questions to make user-generated content more comprehensible.
- Finally, internalize and apply knowledge gained from social networks. You must communicate the lessons imbibed from social network interactions throughout your organization to ensure that the new knowledge gained from interacting with the social networks are put into practice.