Social media marketing strategies

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Much has been made about social media marketing. (A Google search reveals 114 million hits.)

There’s a lot of promise for what social media might offer companies in the future. Right now, however, there tends to be a lot of hesitation and confusion. Increasingly, companies are realizing the importance of maintaining a blog, Facebook and Twitter presence. But it is the rare company that has sought to truly engage customers online in a meaningful and creative manner.

We briefly touched on this topic last quarter in Valarie Zeithaml‘s “Services Marketing” class. Wanting to dive deeper into the realm of social media marketing, it became the topic of my final paper. In it, I’ve summarized the strategies in which today’s managers can leverage social media to achieve three key business objectives: customer acquisition, customer service and customer retention. More generally, I’ve also recommended that companies:

• Monitor the online conversation and empower employees to take action
• Respond quickly to consumer complaints and praise
• Utilize reviews and consumer-generated content as “intelligence”
• Stay honest

114 million pages on the Internet? Make that 114,000,001.