Rumen Vyrbanov
The Business Potential of Social Media Platforms
Summary:
Web 2.0 technologies have changed the business environment and have become a ‘must’ of any business strategy, whether it is a large company or a small and medium-sized enterprise.
Modern social media have a lot of sophisticated tools and technologies that can be successfully used to attract new customers, promote brand (recognizable identity for our product or service), boost sales, increase a company’s website traffic, build effective customer relationships, manage online reputation, facilitate communication with customers, incl. online, optimize search engines, etc. However, at the same time, social media are not just a collection of new tools and technologies – they develop and establish new business models, and require that managers and business owners have a lot of new knowledge and a new way of thinking.
In the social media environment small enterprises can successfully compete with large companies, regardless of the different advertising and marketing budgets. Although modest, the existing experience shows that with an adequate viral campaign organized in the social Web space small and medium-sized enterprises can generate huge traffic to their sites, improve communications with customers and achieve greater sales.
This study attempts to offer practical solutions for using social media in business processes. It focuses on several questions:
• What the Web 2.0 potential is expressed in for businesses and what ad¬vantages it provides;
• What the specific characteristics of social Web space are that are important in the use of Web 2.0 for business purposes;
• What the content behind the term ‘social media’ is and what its business poten¬tial is;
• What the nature and scope of social media is and what reasons justify the huge interest of businesses in them in recent years;
• How Social Media Optimization (SMO) and Social Media Marketing (SMM) can be used in the interest of businesses.
The first part of the study examines the basic characteristics and specific features of the second generation of Web services contributing to the use of Web 2.0 for business purposes. According to the author the new way of interaction and the ease of integration that are characteristic of Web 2.0 are expected to make radical changes in corporate information systems (IS), and hence in the business of companies.
The second part analyzes the nature and manifestation of social media. It gives a brief overview of social media and describes their potential for the development of small and medium-sized businesses, concluding that social media tools can be used successfully to attract customers, increase traffic to the website, boost sales, promote the brand and form a target audience. However, at the same time social media are something more than business tools – they require a new way of thinking, a new ap¬proach to the business of the company and to customers, an orderly and reasoned strategy for working in the new social environment.
The third part presents the capabilities of the two new and still not widely used tools for the popularization of the site in the social media – Social Media Optimization (SMO) and Social Media Marketing (SMM). Companies that will migrate to Web 2.0 have to have a good understanding of SMM tools in order to be able to determine which of them are suitable for a particular business and how to approach their actual use. The author argues that the good performance of the site on the Web and providing more traffic today require an integrated approach in using the various techniques for digital and traditional marketing.
