Introduction
Social medial allows varying types of tools to businesses and consumers and carefully selecting tools can help companies to achieve their objectives. Social media tools provide ways of keeping old relationships intact while new ones are established. These tools are often implemented via internet by companies in their attempt to seek out a larger audience and comparatively cheaper way of communication. This paper will discuss various social media tools which have been introduced over the net and commonly used by companies to communicate with their consumers and clients.
Main body
There are six most commonly used social media tools which companies can use to send messages to their customers. These messages which business may decide to communicate through social media from time to time may cover information regarding the business, vital information, company news or a marketing campaign. These six social media tools include RSS Feed Aggregator, Blog, Shared Bookmarks, Thought Stream Aggregator, Microblogging and Shared Content (ConverStations, 2008). In addition to these social medial tools typical ones used by businesses may include emailing, forums, podcasts and videos (Hollier, 2009). These tools are much more personalized and require much more time involvement by companies to develop material to be presented to customers.
The earlier mentioned tools are considered to be more interactive between companies and their customers where customers could subscribe to some of the services offered through these tools by companies that allow customers to receive information without interruptions. The customers can also share their experience and make comments through social media tools such as corporate blogs and shared content which businesses can use as feedback to improve their current processes or products. In this way businesses become responsiveness to the changing customer trends and learn from the contributions made by customers who use these social media tools. It is further suggested that social media tools if carefully planned and implemented can help businesses to gain interest from potential customers in their products and services. This way the existing customers of the company can actually play a role of marketers for the company’s products and services. In this way companies can benefit from low costs of communicating with a large and diversified customer base. On line advertisement through networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Orkut etc. also allows to provide customers with much more interactive experience through which companies are able to gather first hand experiences and respond to customer inquiries immediately (Hopkins, 2009). Some companies have even carried out pre-launches of their advertisement campaigns and services via these social media tools before implementing them through other means. This way business can minimize the risk of failure and can react to the market swiftly and even avoid bigger losses.
Conclusion
Thus to conclude it could be stated that web technologies in the form of social media tools are becoming increasingly popular and important for businesses to communicate with their customers and clients. These social media tools allow companies to communicate with their customers on a regular basis and thus provide a medium of continuity of relationship between businesses and their customers. However, as these tools are less regulated in many countries therefore their use is also restricted in some way or another.
Reference
ConverStations. (2008). 6 Social Media Tools Every Business Should Use. Web.
Hollier, P. (2009). The Tools of Social Media. Web.
Hopkins, L. (2009). Social Media – The New Business Communication Landscape. London: Ark Group.