Consumer Engagement Tools on Social Media

There are more and more big brands aware of the importance of social media in their consumer relationship management, brand promotion and sales driven campaigns. Dell reported that it has generated sales of over $6.5 million via its presence on Twitter. According to the Watson Research Center, part of IBM, there are around 100 million blogs that use RSS feeds, which provide another way for businesses to identify relevant electronic word-of-mouth. Accompanying such perception of social media and the targert consumers, those social media forerunners create several new ways of doing business, in today’s blog, I will introduce some of them.

First: Integrated Q&A tools for answering questions of consumers at instantly.

Dell and Samsung subscribe to a system called BrandAnswers which shows all questions about their products across different media platforms and gives the manufactures one place to inform all inquisitive consumers at once. The analysis shows that answers from manufacturers are most helpful to consumers. Answering customers’ questions can help maintain good brand loyalty. Moreover, it can help manufactures get first-hand insights into the types of questions they have. All this information then gives product managers valuable information that drives product enhancement and development.

You can see more details on how the BrandAnswers function by clicking the following video play button:

Second: embedded instant chatting tools to support the online shopping sites.

This makes the online shopping experience more personalized and point-to-point. Bank of America credit card application and Backcountry outdoor gear shop adopt a system from LivePerson to provide online instant chatting service for consumers. At the same time, they can collect first-hand information on consumer insights before selecting the brands. (See the pictures on the top of this post).

Third: directly embed social media sites into the company official site.

Doing so the hosts can keep the visitors, at the same time, those social networking sites make it incredibly easy customers to share promotions and positive word-of-mouth marketing about brands in a single click with his or her network of friends. For example, if an e-commerce site owner uses Facebook Connect, it will let members log in to their Facebook accounts without leaving the e-commerce site. This is important because when they log in, the site has access to profile information about the member that can be used for personalization. E-commerce Web sites can make it easy for their customers who use Facebook to post the things they find and like on their Facebook Wall — where their network of friends will see it.