Editorial note: This post is sponsored by the Finnish Software Entrepreneurs Association as part of their competition on ArcticStartup from last year. In the future, we won’t publish sponsored posts, but only series of posts supported by companies.
People don’t get Facebook. People don’t get social media.
Social media is not – and should not be – just another news flow site. Social media is also not just a place to meet your friends and colleagues online. Then what really makes social media such a hot topic?
Everything really boils down to one simple question: what should one focus on when viewing social media from a business point of view? Now, before answering that question, here’s a gentle suggestion: first, one should understand that social media sites are to be viewed as gold mines of data, efficient channels of influence, real business and marketing jewels – all this, and a lot more.
Then how can you take advantage of these assets? One viable answer lies in systems integrations. Huge amounts of semantic information of your real customers becomes instantly available by pairing the data and people on social media sites (such as Facebook), with your company’s client register. And what does it take to expose this data? Need a real world example? Just hit the Like button on one of the millions of Facebook pages and up-up we go!
So, instead of brainstorming ingenious campaigns and seeking the most viral ways of spreading the word your company is present in social media, wouldn’t you rather focus on making your existing customers more loyal, more addicted and more profitable?
You could always lure in newcomers to your social media site. Imagine John, who stumbles onto your site for the first time. Any purchase he might make is probably a loooong way ahead in the future. So, instead of creating vague paths to a site, you could instantly pair John’s personal information with statistics on your existing customer register, to display the one product or service that might most appeal to John the instant he visits your page. From there, you could present John with a shorter and more concrete path to buy: just hit the “Add to cart” or “Buy instantly” button, and heck, while he’s at it, he might click the Like button on his way out to notify all of his friends that he has found something of personal value and interest to him. And thus the snowball effect follows…
The point of all this is simple: all the data held by your company can be made as sexy as Facebook.
Androidi Oy was built on these insights, offering web based solutions from small campaign sites to manageable Facebook applications and marketing and customer data integrations, and all the way up to tailored extranets. Most of our solutions are built on the awesome Drupal content management platform.
