"Organizations must have a clear view of the goals they want to achieve through social media"

Ensuring Social Media As An Asset For Business
Websites, Blogs, Microblogs, Picture/ Video sharing, Wall posting, Social Media has revolutionized the way the world communicates today. It has changed the way we make friends and maintain relationships. The level of reach and penetration achieved by social media in such a short span of time is testament of its mass acceptance and utility. Thus, making it hard to overlook. It has established its effectiveness and is becoming a desired tool for business, politics and society alike.

However, social media possess its own threats and challenges, especially for businesses as it can be used for spreading misinformation, rumours and build pressures. It can also be used by cyber criminals to strike individuals and corporate alike, to steal information of people at critical positions in organizations and initiate targeted crimes.

Despite these threats, businesses find social media a fit case to engage and create additional channel for interaction with customers and general public; enables to do corporate research and market study; obtain product feedback, address customer grievances, create information of marketing campaigns, create customer awareness, enables to understand customer needs and align business.

Percolation of various types of devices and availability of adequate bandwidth enables social media to retain and rope in new tech savvy users. In contrast to website, the populace has 24x7 availability of social media access on their mobile appliances enabling interactive engagement is more satisfying than the static website.

Social media brings in a sea of changes in the business by allowing them to derive the following benefits:-
Customer Relationship Management by establishing communication without the burden on official communication lines at call centres.

Marketing campaigns can be created for new products/ services besides disseminating information about special offerings.

Seek Customer’s response to questions posted by business. These can be used for conducting surveys, collecting and collating level of customer satisfaction on existing products.

Enables Feedback Mechanism resulting into product innovation/ modification by tailoring customized/ personalized services after understanding customers’ individual needs thereby increasing customer delight.

Provides additional channel for customer grievance redressal needing efficient handling to avoid negative sentiment going viral exponentially as slow, inadequate, improper response may spiral adversely resulting into backlash of unsatisfied customers.

social media is a boon or bane is determined by efficient management of these issues resulting into organizations deriving big benefits. Organizations must have a clear view of their goals they want to achieve through social media and create strategy to make it a win-win for both parties. In fact not engaging social media efficiently is the biggest threat a business faces from social media.