Marketing is all about reaching out to your potential customers and marketing teams are always willing to experiment methods which will attract more footfalls to their store or more eyeballs to their website. Undoubtedly the marketing teams are allocating increasing budgets to online marketing rather than traditional marketing methods.
SEO, Social Media Integration, Uploading Videos, Writing Blog Posts, Participating in online communities, Sharing knowledge and views through guest posts are some of the ways we recommend and encourage our clients to have a quality web presence.
Companies are adopting social media for establishing an online brand, for customer support, for launching new products, etc. Whenever we have the social media training sessions and workshops the main question which often comes up is that:
What if competition uses it against us by spreading negative posts?
Undoubtedly Social media has a tremendous reach where a positive word spreads fast but the negative word spreads faster. But, when you have a social media presence atleast you can listen to what is being said about you. Just because you do not listen that does not mean people are not speaking about your brand. If you listen then you can put your point forward using the same media.
It does not matter if one social media profile speaks against you . The word of mouth becomes the world of mouth when a collective voice speaks about it in the same tone. There will be likes and dislikes, there will be positive tweets and negative tweets but eventually the majority along with the way you handle negative publicity on your social media profiles will matter the most.
If that is the fear that is stopping you to engage on social media then remember the basic Math rule learnt in school that when adding numbers always subtract and keep the sign of the larger number (Thats your collective voice - Know which voice should be ignored and subtracted and which voice has to be heard) . So, eventually it is the majority which sets the opinion and if majority of the people are speaking against your product then it is high time you did something about it and these social signals itself can be at times the true feedback you needed.
Trust me when such negative campaigns get converted to positive word of mouth due to the action taken by the company to accept their fault and make rectifications a whole new impetus of positive feedback is generated which adds more goodwill and online reputation. People like it when they are being heard or are being answered to.
Again it is not about numbers totally the authority voice in your industry matters a lot and they voice their opinion only when they totally accept a certain product and vouch for a service or when they are totally in disagreement of a product, service or viewpoint as their main aim is to safeguard the interests of the industry rather than getting personal.
Hence, don't just follow the herd, listen to the collective and selective voices.
