Essay Sample on Social Media: A Powerful Tool for Brand Marketing & Customer Intimacy

Contrary to what social media is popularly known for (advertising), these platforms can play a crucial role in brand marketing. Since keeping customers is much easier than looking for new ones, social media can help different organizations attain customer intimacy. This emerging platform can leverage the effort of companies to maintain their customers. Salesforce.com is a typical example of the world's thriving business solutions for social customer relationship management. Again, social media has been phenomenal in addressing service recovery. In these modern communicating platforms, service recovery is executed with immediate effect to avoid catastrophic failures in businesses. Engaging in social media marketing requires a strategy. The process does not only entail identifying merchants, businesses and consumers but also focuses on the publishing, community and social commerce. Companies employ different marketing campaigns to attain marketing success.

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The three strategies-social publishing, community, and social commerce-of executing this type of marketing can help in reviewing campaigns on different levels. To begin with, a social community can engage members in researching, discussions as well as providing access to how-to guides. The proposals in these forums enable different populations to reach numerous members conveniently. In the case of American Express, the initiation of small business Saturday together with the open forum community has led to small companies posing a competitive threat to more prominent retailers. Small companies have witnessed transformation courtesy of the public forum with a social community.

The social publishing holds content that is generated from contributors, branded content, as well as user content. When users participate in the content generation, the relationship between them and the marketers become mutual, thereby facilitating proper marketing. The first American Express card purple paper attracted the most likes that the brand has ever recorded in history due to the engaging content in the #AMEX Archive. American Express has engaged its members in numerous ways. For example, the organization persuaded people to use its campaign hashtags during its birthday. Some of these hashtags were affiliated with the products of the American Express.

Social media marketing requires social commerce. This platform offers members with different services. Again, this platform would provide discounts with, and request customers to share the offers with other various social media platforms. AMEX has developed both @AskAmex twitter profile for customer requests as well as an application called link like love. As a result, brand awareness has been facilitated since people can see different postings on Facebook and Twitter.

Capitalizing the three illustrated levels of social media marketing comes with business implications. Firstly, coming up with a social community markets a brand to numerous members. Open forum community reduces the cost of marketing by reaching too many members in one organized community. Again, this zone of social media marketing gives birth to a competitive advantage. Social publishing makes members create interest. Engaging content presents customers with an opportunity to participate and table their dissatisfactions and interests. Engaging content also makes marketers access their customers by analyzing their behaviour. User-generated content can also be used by marketers to make their long-time decisions based on customers' preferences. Social commerce helps customers get access to marketers' products and services and get available orders. Social commerce platforms have been phenomenal in creating a good relationship between customers and suppliers.

However, despite the tremendous advantages, social media is also associated with some complications. What if you have an unfortunate encounter with your customer? Some customers choose to channel their frustrations to the public in the social media, an act that can damage the reputation of your company. Things can be fatal, especially when there are no formulated measures to curb the same. This can make companies can suffer significant customer loss. Again, what if there is a need for a service recovery? This has to be done so urgently before things turn catastrophic. Information in social media spreads like a bush fire, and as such, these platforms allow us to convey information to a large group of people.