Social Media: A budding means of providing customer satisfaction
-Abhishek Gupta and Upasana Kanchan Gupta
Customer satisfaction is essential to the survival of any business. But how can you find out whether your customers are satisfied? The best way to find out whether your customers are satisfied is to ask them.
When you conduct a customer satisfaction survey, what you ask the customers is important. How, when, and how often you ask these questions are also important. However, the most important thing about conducting a customer satisfaction survey is what you do with their answers. As it becomes increasingly important to measure website and social media analytics in real-time, new optimisation tools are rising to the surface and gobbling up investor dollars.
What is social media?
Zoo Zoo, the marketing stars of Vodafone has more than 7.4 lakh fans and around 70 lakh people visited their videos through YouTube. Puppet star of TATA sky’s active services receive more than 75 wall post entries per day on Facebook. Adidas, utilises social networks on My Space; American Express, has a blog entitled Open forum; Bank of America has two social networking pages: Small business community on Clear Space and Model Me! on Facebook; CNN utilises microblogging on Twitter; Coca-Cola has a Facebook social network; Pizza Hut uses social network websites like Facebook, etc.
Social media use web-based technology to quickly disseminate knowledge and information to a large number of users. They allow creation and exchange of users’ generated content. Facebook, Twitter, Hi5, Orkut and other social networking sites are referred to as social media.
For a brand, the social media is all about online conversations. These conversations form a huge marketplace for brand engagement. The stakeholders in these powerful conversations could be anybody customers, employees, investors. Anyone who has access to Internet and has an opinion is a player in this marketplace.
FACTS:
- There are more than 250 million active users of Facebook
- More than 120 million users log on to Facebook daily
- Only 1/3 of total users are students
- There are around 44 million users of Twitter
- Around 94 percent of total users are having more than 100 followers
- Data shows that the number of female users of Twitter are more than male users
- There are around 375million visitors of You tube
- The rate of upload to Youtube video is around 10 hr/min
- There are around 112 million blogs are available, with 1,20,000 new ones appearing each day
Many more of such facts are available to explain the reach of social media. These facts show how attractive social websites are now-a-days.
According to 2010 Regus Global Survey of business social networking, India tops the usage of social networking by business – it has the highest activity index, 127, far more than the US’97, and 52 percent of Indian respondent companies said that they had acquired new customers using social networks while 35 percent American companies managed that.
The exciting thing about social media is it offers the opportunity to engage in two way conversations with your customers. What better way to know how best to serve your customer than to hear directly from them?
Social media has enabled new ways to initiate conversations, respond to feedback and maintain an active dialogue with customers. But it is not enough to just create an account or profile on a social media site. It is vital to provide new & interesting updates frequently to attract and keep followers and friends.
Happy Networking!
Abhishek Gupta is Asstt. Professor, Shri Ram Murti Smarak College of Engineering & Technology, Bareilly.
Upasana Kanchan Gupta is Asstt. Professor, Lal Bahadur Shastri Institute of Management & Technology, Bareilly
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