[Closed] To what extent does your company use social media?

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7000000+ followers, along with who knows how many twitter followers either across the business. Lots of our sales guys use twitter to get the message across to their known customer base. As do support and marketing. I suspect there's a very large department in Austin dedicated to managing it all, along with reams and reams of policies. It's all very very effective. It has to be [i]the[/i] way to speak to and more importantly listen to your customer currently available.

If you're going to do it, don't do it the way we have. We bleat on about it constantly, you can even see a little of it on our intranet. However, social media is blocked from our network so we can't actually keep up with what's going on! It's not very clever having the customer with more current information than your staff.

Absolutely not. We don't attend trade fairs and we stopped having the contact details on the vans because it attracts small, time-wasting customers. If the sales force don't know who is worth visiting, they're not doing their jobs. We have a website but it just attracts occasional enquiries from tyre-kickers.

We've got too much work without the small customers; last Monday we had 350 batches to manufacture when we can usually make about 100 a day. We are currently investing £5 million in a robotic factory and won't be needing tyre-kickers for that either.

They employed me to do it

Absolutely not. We don't attend trade fairs and we stopped having the contact details on the vans because it attracts small, time-wasting customers. If the sales force don't know who is worth visiting, they're not doing their jobs. We have a website but it just attracts occasional enquiries from tyre-kickers.

We must work at the same place!

I don't think it brings me much in the way of new business, but it does keep existing customers interested - it's very hard to judge, though. It's certainly much less important than my website.

My idea is more aimed at engaging existing customers. Live updates with how their work is progressing, pictures of work in progress. An added value sort of thing.

Our managing director preaches that we are all about the customer, we build relationships with the customer and help their brand grow through knowledge of their goals etc.

But the point about tyre kickers does come as a good one. Hmm.

It should depend on who your customer are. Eg we sell to Mobile Network Operators, billion dollar entities, so a twitter feed isn't really going to make a difference. We know who all the MNOs are and they know who all the suppliers are. We employ well connected Sales people to get us business from them.

My idea is more aimed at engaging existing customers.

The best way is to have your sales guys embedded in the customer, sat in their HQ every day. That's what we do.

One of the skills you acquire as you reach the top of your game in your forties or fifties, is the ability to discriminate between good and bad business and say no, gracefully, to the bad. In most businesses the 80/20 rule applies, whereby you get 80% of your business from 20% of your customers and could really do without the remaining 80%, if it wasn't for the fact that some of them might grow bigger. With us it's more like 90/10.

No idea. The company puts its twitter etc on the bottom of emails, but alas they block the use of social networking on the computers so no-one at work can actually see it.

We are not large enough to deploy 1 sales person per big customer. We have several 'main' buyers who I question whether or not this idea is worth it (one of the customers turn over in 2011 was in the billions).

I'm more aiming this at the small local companys and trying to keep them with us and make them feel like we really are different from our competitors.

We are a print/creative design/marketing company. We can literally provide the whole package for a business. Print, website, online sales order sites, design work, marketing. We are quite expensive but we do a good job and I think my idea adds a little something extra to the smaller customers.

Perhaps the best way would be to ask management "Can I ask a couple of our customers if we can trial this idea on them and get feedback?"

Would you appreciate, from an engagement and personal perspective, if you'd requested a job from our company and while the machine minder was printing your job uploaded a picture of your print (providing it wasn't a secret you were waiting to release for some "huge unveil") and adding a small comment like "Hi *company name*, Bradley here just giving you a live update on your A6 post cards, they look great and should be with you shortly!".

I personally would appreciate it, having paid good money for the service. Argh. I don't know.

Depends on your business.

If you're FMCG, or selling any service that joe public will use - then sure.

If you're selling B2B or selling corporate services, largely useless.

Plyphon has got it spot on.

In our business it would certainly help if we could access a live update on our shipments at our various shipping and airfreight agents' websites or something similar, because overseas customers are always asking for ETAs and scanned advance copies of shipping documents to enable them to start the clearing process before the goods arrive. The shipping industry is staffed by people who don't like to think beyond the immediate job in hand and once they've shifted a consignment they move on to the next one so it has taken us years even to persuade our deep sea agents to scan and email copy bills of lading to us to gain a couple of days over the post.

So yes, in certain contexts up to the minute information is very helpful and avoids time-wasting phone calls.

Our intranet is effectively a social media platform. It's built on MS sharepoint, but has a completely different look and feel, with the main page dominated by a newsfeed that's a cross between Twitter and Facebook. It's very good.

Outside, we do use it for B2C customer care in addition to the normal channels. As plyphon said, that's pretty much essential for any consumer-facing business.

I use it professionally, and personally, but make sure my separate twitter accounts never cross paths....

Don't underestimate the work it might be to keep your social media appearance up to all these customers.

We use it quite a lot, for targetted marketing and the like. It's also good for filtering out terrible enquiries, our email and website enquiries are definitely better now that most of the unreadable gibberish is on our facebook.

My sister has a business that controls all aspects of social media for companies. The general consensus is that companies don't really have the time or expertise to pitch themselves in the right areas of social media.
She offers really competitive rates if anyone is interested ?

We're a B2B software engineering shop, so we don't bother with social media.
We do have a LinkedIn presence though, as that gets used a fair bit in software circles.

they block the use of social networking on the computers so no-one at work can actually see it.

I've heard that some of those new fangled mobile telephones can do the Twitters.

Twitter, badly.
After two years we're up to a couple of hundred followers...just for comparison my daughter is 13, and has 700 followers, many of her friends have thousands of followers.
As we're now down to one tweet every three days or so, I'm not sure why we bother.

That's where you need someone to do it for you rogg

Shameless plug j5kol.

I understand the work required potentially but don't see this as an issue.

I think I'm going to put it to the management team. Perhaps our marketing leader too. We have a social media team put together but they don't seem to do anything apart from a few random monthly posts.

Surely it'd be cheaper to send one of the team on a social media marketing training course (there is bound to be one out there) and then allocate 2hrs of their time per week to push the social media campaigns than pay an out-worker to do it. Then you have the expertise in house and can also push this service to existing clients using your other marketing services.