I have interested myself in social media since the beginning, almost ten years ago (already). A lot of content has been developped about this topic, and how to use social media for business. Social media has grown fast, its use for marketing and sales purpose too.
But social media has entered in 2012 in a new era. To me, the transition has been marked by the IPO of Facebook. Indeed, social media companies like Facebook but also Twitter started a new phase when investors starts to ask for EBIT and profits.
This era started also by a slower growth of the number of users. There are still a lot of expectation from the marketing experts as I am, but the perspective changes. We start to see more and more studies questionning the supposely better efficiency than social media was suppose to offer.
From my prospective, I consider that it remains difficult to track the full benefits you may get from social media exposure.
But what is sure, is that companies that invest in social media tends to have the best results, or at least, tends to perform better than their competitors, especially regarding sales growth or market share gains.
Why? It is about the same than customer centric strategies:
1- These companies tend to create and innovate more, and we all know how innovation is important in these challenging times.
2- They tend to bond more with their clientele, so they tend in general to create more service and therefore more added value to customers.
Therefore there are a true, demonstrable correlation between business performance and social media presence. Now the goal is to have a clearer view of this link to understand it better, and to leverage it at its full potential.
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