Recent statistics show that one of every seven minutes spent online is on Facebook, 340 million tweets are sent every day and Pinterest is the go-to social network used mostly by female users, while Google+ is predominately used by men. Needless to say, it’s not too hard to see why businesses are increasingly leveraging these types of platforms in order to see a multitude of benefits as well as keep their competitive edge.

While these social media mega sites are increasingly being utilized by consumers to voice their opinions in regards to either a delightful or extremely frustrating experience with a specific company, it is key that businesses treat this growing communication channel with care. Once a consumer talks about a brand in a negative light, it could lead prospects to turn to another provider or even essentially tarnish a company’s reputation forever. 

Thus, a dedicated set of employees must continuously monitor these sites as more and more people use these channels to ask questions and resolve complaints in a shortened period of time.

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“In 2013, it is extremely likely that social media will help to provide “better insight into customer behavior, improved office productivity with internal networks and, of course, significant, measurable ROI,” Eric Savitz writing for Forbes revealed at the end of last year. Some of the ways it can revolutionize business operations include social media being leveraged company-wide, compliance within this space becoming mandatory and international and niche social networks bringing new obstacles to light.

Marketing companies are also using these websites to interact with a large group of people much more efficiently, yet still have a very long road to travel.

In a survey, it was revealed that currently, only five percent of companies surveyed are happy with the marketers running their social campaign, while 65 percent of marketers claim that comparing the effectiveness of marketing across different digital media is “a major challenge” for their business. In order to overcome these challenges, marketing and sales teams must come together to create a seamless plan that involves measuring the results of the campaign at set increments in order to see how exactly it is benefiting them. This will make it much easier for companies to see what is working well and what areas need to be improved upon.

 A piece featured on the Business 2 Community site added, “Marketing should integrate CRM software or some other means of capturing leads into all recommendations as well. Sales and marketing personnel should meet regularly on patterns of behavior that appear surrounding different marketing tactics. If it is discovered that extremely expensive marketing efforts are performing at a lower performance than more cost-effective tactics, the company could turn a loss into a profit with a fair amount of ease.”

These very popular sites have quickly become an essential tool in any organization’s tool box. Creating a better dialogue with a wide customer base, driving traffic to a company website and promoting interest over a new product/solution are all made easy with social media in hand.

“Very often, the key to success is to share adroitly branded and highly relevant content with users who, in turn, pass your content to like-minded people they’re connected to. Your effectiveness at social media marketing can be measured by the demonstrable monetization of your efforts,” Forbes added.

At ITEXPO Miami happening this week, expert panelists during “What Your Marketing Team Needs to Know About Social Media,” will explore ways marketing teams can leverage social media to interact much more efficiently with customers.

Get in the know with social media because it has lots of room to grow!