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The use of social media for business is not just to create content for customers and future customers, but to interact with them and build community. It is also possible to use social media as a communication system internally.
WHY TO USE SOCIAL MEDIA AS A COMMUNICATION TOOL WITHIN YOUR COMPANY?
Use of Social Media for Business Communication:
The use of social media as a communication tool internally facilitate your employees, customers and partners on how to distribute and access information.
After all, social media can help companies create what we call here “the collective intelligence of the company”. This concept is the development of a database internally. It allows you to maintain and develop the ideas, processes which was shared by employees, collaborators and partners strategies.
Social media companies have the advantage of structuring their conversations.
The majority of current electronic communication is done by email. However, the email communications are unstructured. There is no thread or place where it is possible to easily find conversations and exchanged files over a period of time. Social media companies have the advantage of structuring their conversations. The information becomes more easily accessible to all employees and collaborators.
For example, consider the case of a group sales manager of an SME (Small Medium Enterprises) who exchange guidelines, summaries of meetings, questions and answers via a email mailing list. This information is unstructured, in the sense that once an e-mail is archive, it becomes inaccessible.
The same type of exchange and conversation used on a social media internally is accessible by all group members. Thus, when a person joins the team, they will have access to all the conversations of his group.
Use of Social Media in CUSTOMER PORTAL:
The use of social media is not only to facilitates information flows internally that are shared by your employees, but they can also help you to set up a private portal for your customers.
The portal is directly related to the employee or employees responsible for accounts receivable. This portal enables a privileged channel of communication with your customers. As the use of social media in-house by a company, the customer portal creates a communication archive.
Social Media Platforms for Corporate Use:
There are several social media platforms that are dedicated to corporate use. Platforms such as Yammer (Microsoft) Chatter (Salesforce), Social Text and Jive offer similar to the ones you find features on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
These applications allow you to chat, create conversations, make status updates, create groups and add the important files for your communications internally and with customers and partners. These SaaS (software as a service) solutions does not require installation or maintenance. These are services that are in the SaaS movement and cloud computing.
The use of a dedicated communication between members of your organization, your partners and your customer, the use of social media platform will allow you to organize information better and make it more easily accessible.
In the recent past, these applications were reserved for large companies. One of the benefits of cloud computing is the ability to reduce operating costs and thus make these tools available to every individual. So, now answer the question, does your company use a social network internally? If no, then your definitely don’t know the use of social media for business communication.
