Today world is full of Social Networks; it is
incredible how the Y and C generations are so dependent and addicted to their
social networks, it has transformed the marketing industry and the way companies
reach new segments.
It’s important to understand that social networks born with
the purpose of maintain contact with friends and as entertainment. Facebook was
definitely the first network that really had a big impact in the whole world,
even though it was not the first social network in the market.
Soon, companies realize the potential of social media to
reach big masses with their advertisements and that’s when the activity of
Social Networks started to look profitable for organizations.
Here is where I come to the picture; my family operates it’s
own business in Mexico and few years ago we started to wonder how can we take
advantage of Social Networks.
My family business is a 25-year-old company dedicated to the
distribution of stationery and office products in all the country (similar to
Staples). Obviously we do not posses unlimited resources, time and access to
information, but we still want to create a competitive advantage using all the
channels we have at our disposal.
The challenge is how to increase our market share and build
better and stronger relationships with our current customers using social
media.
In order to start developing a marketing strategy we need to
acquire data about our most profitable and loyal customers, and the most
potential buyers that we would like to attract, we would need to know where
they buy, how large are their budgets for the products that we offer, what are
the things that they value the most (price, on time delivery, quality, etc.),
all these information is not so easy to get, however, through social networks
analysis we could identify the connections of our potential customers and use
our network to reach them.
The most important measure that we would need is to find a connection
between our company and the buyer of the companies that we want to reach,
finding these persons it’s not so easy because sometimes there are
confidentiality clauses that other companies cannot break, but once we could
have contact with these buyers we could start to build relationships and
hopefully start doing business to increase our customer portfolio.
The Social Network Analysis will definitely play an
important role in accomplish this challenge we had set up, through this
analysis we would be able to identify key persons and companies, we would be
able to receive customer feedback and complaints more directly and faster from
our customers in order to fix or areas of improvement, and we would be able to
retain our customers now that competitions is so strong in our industry.
