ZCS BLOG

Social Media are now part of our lives and in the same way are beginning to be a part of business. To improve the way to communicate and do business, nowadays also the companies are beginning to approach and integrate the use of these tools within their own strategies.

With over 2 billion people using social media, today the organizations have a great opportunity to reach their target audience and build relations through direct dialogue.

In Italy from this point of view we can say that major organizations have a very large percentage of use but remains to be done among SMEs, although compared to a few years ago the situation is increasingly positive. What we will do is to identify the elements for which it is worth today use social media within companies, elements that should lead to do that, especially those companies that are still hesitant.

Social Media as a work and collaboration tools

Social media enable Collaboration, not only outward but also inward. Many platforms that allow employees to work profitably with a wide range of options, such as Slack, that is very complete. Facebook too is increasingly oriented to become a platform for collaboration between employees. The most popular and populated social network today is seen as a business tool even within a company.

But companies need to increase the value of collaboration among employees using social media because today the companies ambassadors outwards are just the employees, those who work there. They are the best resource that companies have for the construction of specific team for these activities. In this way, companies increase the spirit of internal collaboration and get a winning result toward the outside.

Social Media means Messaging too

The messaging phenomenon is unstoppable and WhatsApp and Messenger, both Facebook applications, are driving this great rise. Only these two app include more than 2 billion users. And these two are among the most used by users applications / platforms, including in terms of elapsed time. How can companies employ the use of messaging in a Social Media Strategy? There are not many companies that are moving in this direction, but certainly it is one of the trends that is developing in this year and will be more and more in the next months. The use that currently seems to be the most appropriate is using these as social care instruments, direct customers assistance, focused and dynamic, therefore in real time. Facebook is aiming for Messenger, to make it a direct channel for the customer support, just think of the experiment with KLM that allows direct assistance for flights or monitoring flights directly through the app. Twitter, the first tool that has been used in this light, recently intensified this use, introducing new options.

Social Media and Videos

A few weeks ago Cisco showed in its research that by 2020 the 80% of the web contents, and therefore on Social Media, will be Videos. Recently also Facebook said, through the top manager Nicola Mendelsohn, senior vice president of EMEA Facebook, that the contents on the platform will be only video in the next five years. A prediction that still is in the facts. All platform are now focusing on Video content, that in the past, not very far actually, was just a prerogative of YouTube. And why? Because to date the video is the most involving form on Social Media. To give some numbers, every second almost 1 million minutes of video content is shared; it is estimated that to watch the amount of video that is shared every month it would take some million years. Video content then allows to better intercept a specific audience. For example, recently a research of BuzzMyVideos showed that Millennials are more likely to buy after seeing a positive video review and they would like to interact more with video ads. Just one example of the potential that companies have using Video.

These are the elements that, at this time, may push companies to involve social media in their strategies, and also to use them better.