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Can Social Media be a value proposition for you and your customers?

Written by: Brian Beehler

Article Overview: Today I had a meeting with our external online team to present a Social Media strategy for one of our small business programs. I was basically told that Social Media cannot be used as a value proposition for our small business clients. What I have learned over my experience over the last 10 years is to never discount new ways of thinking.

Can Social Media be a value proposition for you and your customers?

Today I had a meeting with our external online team to present a Social Media strategy for one of our small business programs. I was basically told that Social Media cannot be used as a value proposition for our small business clients. What I have learned over my experience over the last 10 years is to never discount new ways of thinking.

Clearly I was being rejected…

The program has over 350,000 small business clients with over 180,000 active users and at the moment there is no way for our corporation to communicate with them. I was approached to find a way to bring that community together and offer a solution that can help them connect with each other and potential customers. The strategy involved building several applications within Facebook. One application will be meant to acquire new members and the other will offer an e-commerce solution for existing members. Seems simple enough, but their concern was that no one would come to use it because it would be established within an environment that doesn’t have qualified customers. One of the comments made during the meeting was “Facebook is made for personal use only”, I believe in the beginning this was true but now with over 175 million users there must be a way for corporations to capitalize. The whole purpose of the strategy is to figure that out and to offer something new an innovative to our vast network of small business clients. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have the answers of how corporations could use Social Media to make money nor can anyone else make that claim. The one thing I do know is that we must continue to discover new ways to connect and communicate with our customers.

As I mentioned every established company or organization already has a built-in community. The job of social media is to bring together this community under one umbrella (or at the very least, be findable when they come looking for you) and treat them well and continue the relationship.

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Article Tags: 10 years, business clients, business programs, corporations, e commerce solution, job, media strategy, money, must be a way, new ways, personal use, relationship, small business, umbrella, value proposition



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