Why Social Media Is Important To You As A Business Executive
Among the FTSE 350 stock index companies, only a handful of these companies’ chief executives have a presence in social media. Despite the fact that they all acknowledge that social media is a powerful tool for their organizations success.
Each chief executive cites different reasons for why they are not on social media. Ranging from reasons like tweets could be taken out of context and misquoted by the media to not seeing any tangible benefits from time spent on social media especially when looking at blogging.
It’s quite true there could be a serious backlash on a chief executive if s/he post something that provokes negative public opinion. But if used in the right way, that blue Twitter birdie could be the best friend any chief executive could have in terms of achieving an organization’s bottom line.
Your tweets and posts on social media could help your brand establish more trust and loyalty among your target market, so stop being shy and tweet. Courtesy of Cityam.com, we share we you six reasons why social media is important to you as a business executive:
Gives your organization a personal touch: “People trust people, not institutions,” writes Cityam.com. When a business executive interacts with customers online, there are others who watch the conversation. This builds up trust in other people, since they can now see that human side of the organization, with which they can easily relate to and start trusting. When the executives take to talking about their vision and values, they essentially establish a character as leaders.
Establish New Connections: One great advantage of social media, it enables you to watch and listen to people. It removes the bureaucracy involved in the chain of command and enables you to flatten out the organizational hierarchy. This mean top business executive can directly listen to opinions and reviews by customers, and armed with that knowledge they can make the necessary adjustments to their organizations to better meet the needs and expectations of their customers. Having done these changes to their organization, they can then communicate back to their customer and further strengthen their brand loyalty and improve their reputation.
Influence Public Opinion on your Leadership: Leadership is demonstrated through the conversations you are having with your followers and supporters. Conversations about your organization will be taking place on the social media platform, whether you like it or not. The worst mistake as a business leader is to try ignoring these conversations, you are better off getting involved and establish a positive influence in these conversations. In order to do so, you must first engage the people in conversation, as it is only then that you will find out how they really feel and think.
Create Your Own Content: One of the greatest benefits of social media, is that it allows you as a business executive to speak directly to your audience. Before the advent of social media, business leaders were forced to rely on other mediums to relay their message across to their audience. How effective that was, was subject to the level of distortion on that medium. But with Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms, executives can now have their original views conveyed directly and without any ambiguity to their audience. Social media enables you to curate your own content, have consistent communication with multiple stakeholders and no longer need to rely on other mediums.
Create same interest groups: With social media, you can filter out your audience into ‘communities’ with designated online ‘places’ where you and them can meet and ‘hang out’. This mostly applies to Google’s social media platform, where business executives can establish a stronger more relevant networks comprising of stakeholder with similar interest. The advantage of having online ‘communities’ is that it allows you as a business leader to create content, articles and information. That are relevant to a particular group and thus achieve effective communication as opposed to posting news to the general social media community, some of whom have no interest in whatever you are posting, which may lead to a growing habit of them disregarding your successive post since they lost interest with the first one.
Encourage Collaboration: The 21st century world is a fast speed world, things are developing and changing rapidly. To be more effective in this world, you need to collaborate with partners endowed with a particular skill or are experts in a particular field. Since you can’t be everywhere, managing everything, and still achieve maximum effectiveness. As a business leader, you need to encourage collaboration, and social media is one effective platform for doing so. It enables you to exchange information, ideas and imagination. When leaders collaborate through online platform, they also encourage their staff to follow suit and demonstrate their creativity.
Social media is your friend as a business executive, so don’t be shy. You are missing out on a powerful tool that could drive your brand and business to the next level.
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