Improving business processes

Already, many clever businesses have found ways to use social media to
improve business processes. Though individual applications depend on the
nature of your business, consider leveraging social media to

✦ Promptly detect and correct customer problems or complaints
✦ Obtain customer feedback and input on new product designs or changes
✦ Provide tech support to many people at one time; if one person has a
question, changes are good that others do, too

✦ Improve service delivery, such as cafés that accept to-go orders on
Twitter or Facebook or cupcake carts and food caravans that notify customers
where and when their carts will arrive
✦ Locate qualified new vendors, service providers, and employees by
using professional networks such as LinkedIn
✦ Collect critical market intelligence on your industry and competitors by
watching content on appropriate social media
✦ Use new geolocation services to drive local traffic during slow times and
acquire new customers

Marketing is only part of your company, but all of your company is marketing.
Social media is a ripe environment for this hypothesis, where every part of a company, from human resources to tech support, and from engineering
to sales, can be involved.

Improving search engine rankings
Just as you optimize your Web site, you should optimize your social media
outlets for search engine ranking. Now that search engines are cataloging
Twitter and Facebook and other appearances on social media, you can gain
additional front page real estate for your company on Google, Yahoo!, and
Bing.

Search engines recognize some, but not all, appearances on social media as
inbound links, which also improve the page rank of your site.

Optimization pays off in other ways: in results on real-time searches, which
are now available on primary search engines; on external search engines
that focus on blogs or other social media services; and on internal, sitespecific
search engines.