social media engagementThere’s no question that social media has transformed how businesses try to engage and connect with consumers. While this presents numerous advantages, such as the ability to directly advertise products or services on the cheap, perhaps no benefit is as unique as the trove of consumer data that can be harvested from social networking platforms. This data allows businesses to refine their internal strategies, and even how they use social media, by providing an in-depth picture of how consumers interact with and are influenced by any given business.

Although a number of factors are weighed heavily by businesses, many institutions rank connections among the most important measuring stick. The establishment of connections on a social network produces organic growth for a company and expands its potential customer base. These connections can come in a variety of forms: While any established social media relationship with a consumer is counted as a connection, the most valuable ones are those that are likely to produce further connections and expansion.

For example, members of the media have social media accounts that are highly influential. Even those accounts that simply have a large base of followers can increase the potential for a business to expand its connections and influence organically. As cloud storage grows, enterprise cloud providers will likely see a boost in business from global corporations looking to store and quickly access petabytes of personal data gleaned from social networks.

The Demise of Irrelevance

To achieve these goals, businesses can benefit from conducting market research to determine which social media entities are their highest priority. Once these targets are identified, businesses can reach out to these targets through press releases, social media connections and other methods to put their products or services in front of entities that could spur on further social media connections.

  • How you develop a relationship with these targets is all a part of your company’s marketing strategy. Each potential influencer offers a unique set of opportunities for your business. And, in each case, a mutual partnership can bring benefits to both sides. In general, your business has a better chance of benefiting from one of your industry’s influencers when you can provide some tangible benefit to the entities driving social media connections and engagement.
  • Regardless of your engagement strategy, though, the right social media evaluation tools are essential to making sure that the data guiding your social media strategy is accurate and effective. A variety of valuable social media analysis tools are available on enterprise cloud computing networks. The public cloud can be especially valuable to companies looking to enhance their current social media data analysis as a means of better guiding marketing strategy. Companies like Rackspace recognize the potential for innovations in social data analysis and how the cloud can encourage these innovations.

In this day and age, marketing and data mining go hand-in-hand, and social media networks are central to both of these operations. Because social networks are constantly in use, they are always generating new data that can be evaluated in contrast to prior data sets. This allows companies to make changes in strategy based on the data’s recommendations. Businesses are also able to quantify the value of making connections with prominent members of their community.

Organic growth is the key to effective social media, but it’s important not to take “organic” too literally. There are still countless ways businesses can guide and assist this seemingly natural growth, and a growing library of applications, tools and software makes this easier to achieve.