It now seems that Facebook pages, Twitter nourishes, a blog and a Youtube siphon are effectively mandatory for any brand wanting to keep in touch with its customers. Use of these sites can improve brand awareness, but it is a double-edged sword and needs the same planning, care and attention as does any other form of marketing. Companies offering suitable services and expertise have jumped up throughout the last few years.

The first question for a brand is to consider whether to buy-in expertise and products, or even use the free tools and the efforts of their own staff. The main sites depend on many free tools available. These provide facilities to review activity, manage listings and invite a point of content moderation.

Research released in Jan 2013 found that nearly 90 % of promoters are using these free social media products. This is to some extent because the perceived value of paid-for products is not sufficient to sell them, and to some extent due to continued skepticism about the effectiveness of these websites for generating business. Continued bad publicity, such as the recent Twitter password-hacking problems, can produce disinclination to spend on this form of marketing due to concerns about security and credibility.

Free products certainly have their place, specially when starting a presence on Facebook, Twitter and the other sites. However these products require all the expertise to be in-house, and will have very limited support provided  شراء متابعين انستقرام. The paid products come with the expertise of the company concerned, and so there is no need for a company to 'reinvent the wheel' with to build unique strategy and train unique staff. The improved business brains alone may end up in recuperating the costs several times a day over.

Moderation and Crisis Management

The whole point of a social presence is to encourage interaction from customers, and the feedback will be both positive and negative. Leaving discussions unchecked and unedited is very risky, and all sites are at risk of spammers who may post completely improper content. Hence some level of moderation is effectively essential and may get in on any package chosen.

There are several ways of approaching this. At the very least, there should be a simple automatic filter to detect spam, remove obscene listings and flag up questionable listings for attention. More intricate moderation may need human involvement, particularly when two or more dialects are required. As the internet is a 24 hour medium, the moderation strategy needs to deal with listings at all hours. If the costs of 24-hour staffing are too high, then the best compromise may be recreate all listings for pre-moderation before they appear on the site.

Moderators really earn their keep when a crisis hits the brand. This could be due to poor financial results, a website or payment failure or a burst of bad publicity. The role of the moderator is not to remove all adverse results, but to manage the situation as calmly as possible. Keeping customers informed goes a long way towards improving associations, so the fast response of a good moderator will be invaluable.

Monitoring and Analysis

Using a professional package can actually pay off when it comes to producing metrics and analyses of site traffic. The standard social sites offer simple analysis tools to assess the impact of marketing activity, but these utilities can be limited. Custom packages can be tailored to produce the reports that are really needed, and to assess what the shoppers are really doing on the sites. For example, simply pressing a Facebook 'like' button or becoming a Twitter follower does not mean that the site visitor is any deeper becoming a real, money spending customer of the brand.