Consumers are now spending more time on social media networks than any other form of the web. It is amazing how fast social media sites and new ideas are spreading on line. What is your business doing to take advantage of a proactive social media strategy?

Facebook has a monthly audience of nearly a billion visitors. That’s a B as in billion. Other top sites, like Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn, attract hundreds of millions. By now, nobody doubts the power of social platforms, although few marketers have been able to exploit them as fully as they desire.

As Harvard’s Mikołaj Piskorski makes clear in his new book, A Social Strategy, businesses have a long way to go before they truly begin to unlock the potential of the social web. Most marketers, in fact, use social media much as they would ordinary media—to broadcast messages. We are still not working as hard as we can on engagement and building relationships.

And the real potential lies in building relationships and utilizing social platforms to create solutions for customers’ social problems. While consumers are understandably skittish about corporations interjecting themselves their personal conversations, they appreciate the opportunity to meet and build relationships with others. And that, it turns out, this is an enormous opportunity.

That’s why it’s important to make the distinction between a digital strategy that involves social platforms and a true social strategy. For a social strategy to succeed, simply joining the conversation is not enough. You must lead it.

Here are some good ways you can capitalize on social media and improve your customer engagement and relationship building. Put these seven social elements to use in your business’s social media strategy:

Market Research

Nothing new here, as this was always important to a business. What is new is the access to millions of consumer communications, which represents a gold mine of data, available at the low cost of your ability to mine it.

Public Relations

Social networks represent a direct channel into consumers. You need to craft new, compelling messages for them, without selling.

Brand Marketing

Increase the value of your brand through this communications channel. Reinforce old relationships, build new ones, and stretch the real lifetime of both with the value utilities you can provide.

Customer Support

Many ways to add value to the products and services you provide, while increasing your image.

New Product / Service / Business Model Development

Leverage the public pool of ‘collective brain’ to define and test new market opportunities.

Consumer Education

Create valuable discussion boards and other means to respond to ‘asks the expert’ type of information. Ask your customers for information / education they would like to see.

Promotions

Reach more customers with added communications channels. Integrate all of your channels to improve on the information and messages you provide.

Social media gives us a great opportunity to listen in on what people are saying (with lots of emphasis on listening). It has been long known that word of mouth is incredibly powerful, and I’d say it is the best marketing technique in one’s arsenal.

Social listening tools are still somewhat primitive, but they are improving quickly and are already being deployed to help monitor conventional marketing efforts in real time.

Rishad Tobaccowala, on his blog, gives a nice overview of social listening. Among his insights is that you shouldn’t keep your efforts sequestered in an isolated social unit any more than you would wall off other types of research. Rather, you need to make sure to integrate social listening into your overall marketing and customer service efforts.

He also makes the apt observation that heavy influencers are not necessarily heavy users (in fact, they don’t need to consume your product at all). So social media may be the only real shot you have to interact with some of those who can affect how your brand is perceived.

Another nice thing about social listening is how easy it is to integrate it into the rest of your marketing intelligence. It can help shape and augment focus groups, monitor mass media campaigns and combine with other real time resources such as Google Insights.

The bottom line

Social media is a ‘pull’ and not a ‘push’ medium. It is two way conversations … where response time is very important.

By creating a social media mindset and culture within your business, you will be amazed at how your customer base and relationships can grow.

Being social with a great positive engagement isn’t a new way of marketing; it’s a way of doing business. Follow these simple tips and you will be leading the way.

How many of these strategies have you tried in your business? Please share a story or two about some of your social media campaigns.

Social Listening