We all know what social media is but do we understand it? If you have a website with a comment page that simply collects comments from readers with no dialogue from you, is this considered social media? If you have a page on Facebook, a popular social media site, but do not participate in any of the conversations going on, are you really doing social media? I’d say, hardly.

Social media is about providing a medium for people to communicate with your brand and for your brand to communicate to people, without any barrier. Why did I mention barrier? I’m sure you will know some brands who are not actively responding to most comments on their social media platform but are actually active in deleting negative comments. They probably spend more time filtering what goes onto their social media than trying to “rescue” drifting customers. Why do people welcome social media? The same reason why all of us value honesty and genuineness in our daily face-to-face interactions with each other. We see someone as being genuine when we have seen the vulnerable side to him and we like him for it. It’s no rocket science, really. We treat brands we like as our friends. It is important to understand that when you receive negative feedback, you are actually hearing from a customer who cares. If the customer doesn’t care about you and has no intention of patronising your brand the next time, do you think he will be telling you why he is unhappy with your brand? So one of the worst things a brand can do, is to ignore these customers. What will happen to your brand’s reputation? Do you want to become a brand where nobody cares about? If there’s a barrier, what are you and your customers exactly communicating with?

Some brands reading this article might not be participating in social media at all. Well, that’s also fine, because I believe that social media might not be suitable for all brands in all industries. For brands who are doing mobile marketing but are not on social media, should they care about what’s going on in social media? Yes they should because it’s a high possibility that a large number of their customers are on social media and it’s not something that brands should overlook. By monitoring what customers write on other brands’ social media, you will be able to know how they feel, what they think and what they want. I have seen brands’ Facebook pages and there were people asking the brand to make a mobile optimised website, or asking if the brand could send the virtual coupons they are receiving via Facebook to their mobile phones or even asking to join their mobile alerts SMS clubs if the brand has any.

A large number of people who owns a mobile phone with Internet access and who are on Facebook, frequently surf Facebook on their mobile. This means that you can integrate both channels easily. You might be thinking of communicating via Facebook only with a form app or game app but these won’t be available for mobile phone users.

Marketers both in and not in the mobile space can use feedback like this to reconsider whether they have attempted to reach their customers in all possible mediums. The demand for mobile marketing on such social media and put marketers in a better position to decide what they should be improving what they are doing with media channels. Just remember that this shouldn’t be the only channel that marketers use for their market research.

Posted by Bernita