Your business is established within your community. Better yet, maybe you’ve even expanded nationally or internationally. You also have an established customer base that remains loyal to your brand, so why do you need to get on board with social media? Social media isn’t going anywhere, in fact its still growing like wildfire, so if you haven’t hopped on board yet, you need to listen up and hear how it can improve your business.

While social media has been the platform for many start-up businesses to help with brand exposure, it has also quickly become one of the publics most sought-after platforms for sharing their customer complaints and praises for businesses of all sizes. On any given day if you scroll through the latest feed of tweets, guaranteed you will find at least a couple tweets from unhappy or happy customers. If you don’t see a reason to get on the social media train, you need to at least consider what your customers are saying through social media platforms.

Social media isn’t just a great platform for boosting customer service, many mature companies are also embracing it as a tool to enhance their brands and communicate important news and special offers much quicker to their audience than they have in the past. Plus, it’s a very effective and cheap marketing & advertising tactic.

We wanted to share some examples on how some mature businesses (local and global) are using social media effectively and why its working for them.

Starbucks

The multi-conglomerate, global coffee mecca has always marketed a bit unconventionally. Until recently, they had never used mass advertising or media to promote their brand or products. However, to compliment the new advertising, they also realize the importance of social media and that a bulk of their customers are using this relatively new platform. They must be doing something right because they now have over 11 million Facebook fans!

Starbucks is a great example of customer engagement and giving their audience the power to make decisions that would ordinarily be done inside the walls of the coffee giant. Creating a website called “My Starbucks Idea” allows users to submit suggestions to be voted on by Starbucks consumers, and the most popular are highlighted and reviewed. To take it one step further, they also created an “Ideas in Action” blog that gives updates to users on the status of changes suggested. Most recently, they were most widely known for their Free Pastry Day promotion which they announced via their social media platforms. For one day only, they announced that with any beverage purchase before 10:30am, you get a free pastry. This became one of their most successful campaigns and proved that social media is indeed a powerful tool, reaching millions of people instantly. They have also usedFoursquare successfully, offering customer rewards for their customers when they check into their location using the new location based platform.

Earls Restaurants

This is for all of you locals out there in BC. I have always been a big fan of Earls even though my love affair has gone up and down over the years. Even more so recently when they started using Twitter effectively. Earls has taken customer service to a whole different level as far as I am concerned. When I took to the Twitter masses and complained about yet another take out salad missing multiple ingredients, I not only received a quick response, but they also sent me a survey to fill out which asked me to indicate the location in question. Within 24 hours, I received a call from the manager apologizing and saying my next salad is on them. They had my customer loyalty even more now after that instance, and I quickly forgot about the mishap.

JetBlue Airlines is another great example of a young, hip airline taking their customer service complaints seriously and responding quickly. Let’s be honest – airlines have never been an industry known for their exceptional (or quick) customer service, so this is a nice change from the ordinary. They recognized that the majority of their customer base uses the internet and social media and chose to use this as an effective platform to answer any customer complaints – quickly. Not to mention, they always give the name of the customer service agent answering. Brilliant. Most recently, they decided not to use social media after one of their flight attendants caused a media frenzy after quitting his job dramatically (see article in Marketing Vox).They received some criticism over doing this, but a lot of marketing experts see it a smart move on behalf of the airline.

Consider what your customers might be saying about you and if you had an active social media presence, you could have the power to curb negative comments and deal with them quickly. Customers expect their complaints to be addressed with urgency and social media addresses this concern head-on. When users feels their voice is not heard by a company, the negative comments can escalate and spiral into an online public relations disaster.

Say nothing and the problem escalates. Address the negative comments with urgency, and with a strategy. Find out who the leader of the conversation is, reach out to them as well as the rest of your audience.

Toyota

After the rough years the auto industry has recently experienced, Toyota has taken their traditional media advertising to Twitter and Facebook. If you haven’t noticed yet, their commercials celebrating the 10 year anniversary for their ever popular Prius, are all centered around their customers personal stories of their Toyota purchases throughout the years. At the end of the commercial, they encourage you to share your Toyota story via Facebook, creating a nostalgic feel for those consumers who always have and always will love their Toyota. This is most likely due to the auto giants recent issues and recall with the car’s brake problems, which lead to a serious media backlash and multiple consumer complaints. Smart? Time will only tell if this is one way to smooth over their issues and win back consumers. To date, their Facebook Fan page now has over 162,000 fans, which is nothing in comparison to Lady Gaga’s 16+ million fans.

Integrating a social media strategy into a business that has established traditional marketing & media strategies can be a challenge. But social media is the new public relations frontier and must be given a strong look at as part of any businesses communications plan. Simplyzesty.com states that “the alignment of your social media strategy and customer service strategy should not be underestimated.” One reason why it’s important to align the two strategies is to ensure that all customers are receiving the same level of customer service and recognition. Simplyzesty.com also advises to adopt social media at a company wide level in order to avoid trying to learn and understand social media late in the game, not to mention the relationships created, after your social media guru leaves your company, should this happen.

Hopefully you have looked into building a social media presence, or maybe you are already working on it, (great!). Assuming that your business is used to the traditional forms of mass media or handling customer service complaints through email or phone, consider how social media can improve certain areas of your business and enhance your brand. Not to mention, a money saving tactic as well.

We get that social media isn’t for everyone or for all companies. But it is certainly worth any company looking into and determine if there is a fit within any area of the business.