Social Media and Tourism

Before 2005 many planning a trip would rely on travel professionals/experts for advice about great places to go things to see and adventures to embark on. Most of us would go to trusted brands such as Lonely Planet and National Geographic for information and go to a travel agency to buy a vacation package. As such, the travel industry followed a traditional approach of innovation to create differentiation followed by promotion (marketing push) and sales. Travelers were herded by the industry as getting off the usual beaten path would imply a higher time investment to gather information and higher risks.

Rapidly evolving Tourist Landscape:  A world of Tourist 2.0

In 2005 when WEB 2.0 was introduced, Tourism 2.0 (T2.0) was born - revolutionizing the travel industry.  Although T2.0 is supported by technology, there are many other shifts and factors at play. This new approach to internet and commerce shifted the power from the service providers and travel experts to customers. T2.0 model is all about communities, networks, openness, peering, sharing, collaboration and ultimately customer empowerment.

The corner stone of this revolution is lead by User Generated Content, UGC.  Users can share information like never before and the industry can no longer harness it. People are engaged as they want to tell their trip stories, share pictures and experiences. According to Stacey Santos in the “2012 Social Media and Tourism Industry Statistics” regarding trip reviews:

• 46% of travelers post hotel reviews
• 40% post activity/attraction reviews
• 40% post restaurant reviews
• 76% post vacation photos to a social network
• 55% “liked” Facebook pages specific to a vacation”

These statistics help demonstrate to us just the large volume data that is available to consumers online. Travelocity, Expedia, TripAdvisor are just a few examples of Tourism 2.0 sites.  TripAdvisor, for example, connects directly with Facebook and, right of the bat, shows your Facebook friends reviews/activities and prompts you to write a review.

In this environment data becomes transparent: pricing discrepancies are easily spotted and false misinformation is unveiled. No more “Great ocean view” in between buildings. 

Online consumer’s reviews have become the second most trusted source of information for travelers only behind word-of-mouth and friends/ family advice.  Consumers are blocking push marketing and engaging more and more in social networks for travel advice.  The influence of T2.0 data on travelers is undeniably strong “Of those who used social media to research travel plans, only 48% stuck with their original travel plans” says Stacey Santos. Many consumers also feel more confident about their decisions which can now be supported by the unbiased opinion of fellow customers.

Now add collaboration on top of UGC. Customers are engaging and interacting with each other in an unparalleled manner. T2.0 implementations’ role expanded to facilitate that interaction among customers so customers can easily connect to each other and help themselves to get what they want. The collective intelligence and information volume that can be generated in this way exceeds the capabilities of any individual site.

The community concept naturally followed and spread. Gusto, iExplore and IgoUgo are just a few of community sites where users share itineraries, adventures, pictures and other travel information.

IgoUgo Sites even includes other providers (completion) links to facilitate comparison (see below). The speed with which you can consume the information has become such that providers can no longer profit of people’s lack of information or difficulties in finding it. T2.0 Sites that provide the best way for users to rapidly get what they want will profit from it.

 

A Provider’s perspective – HelloBC Case Study:  Social Media and Destination Marketing Organizations (DMO)

Tourism BC (TBC), British Columbia (BC)’s Destination Marketing Organization (DMO), and its online presence, HelloBC, is the first contact point for hundreds of thousands of tourist that visit the province each year.  It represents the province’s 6 tourism RDMO consisting of over 130 communities.   TBC is a leader in leveraging Social Media and Web 2.0 to engage an evolving Tourism landscape of Tourist 2.0.  As one of the first DMOs to include Blogs and User Generated Content (UGC), it won the 2007 Canadian e-Tourism Innovation award.  In a recent Social Media and Tourism book (2012) co-authored by a number of industry experts[i], Dr.  Volo, highlights that HelloBC demonstrates some good “best practices” examples of Social Media adoption, including successfully exploiting Blogs – a medium that has helped re-invent tourism communications.  A number of studies including Hays et al., Shao et al., and Hamill et al. highlight the wide variation and associated challenges DMOs face in Social Media Adoption.

TBC has a progressive strategy to remain relevant with Tourist 2.0.  Its efforts focus on interacting with past, present, and future visitors as well as other stakeholders including residents, in relevant ways, and joining their conversations to build “long-term engagement around an appreciation of British Columbia and its many tourism assets.”  A direct review of HelloBC and its history, coupled with insight from (1) 2008 - 2011 interview and Blogs from HelloBC’s prolific strategist, William Bakker (now Chief Strategist  at Think! Social Media)), and (2) Volo’s expert observations highlight the following points:

• TBC’s strategy included incremental steps, with experimentation and refinement. The Blog effort migrated from DMO content, to partner content, and finally to the successful 2007 UGC introduction.

• The importance of a “Web 2.0” culture is echo by a number of other experts including Wollan et al. In addition to having a progressive, internal culture, HelloBC updated its systems to support this effort in a scalable manner. Volo advises DMOs to adopt Web 2.0 social media cultural changes, internally and externally, including Blogs which are integrated with other Social Media platforms. This adoption includes accepting customer empowerment, partnership, open communications, mutually beneficial information sharing and to openly acknowledge cases of promotion.

  

• The UGC effort (1) “added a whole layer of credibility”, (2) created insightful, directed, timely and engaging responses, (3) leveraged mass collaboration/engagement of the community, and (4) created a virtuous engagement cycle which enabled HelloBC to gather more insight on consumers, their segmentation, and to identify important tourism activities and assets. The power of UGC is in its authenticity, in its storytelling, and in its ability to engender an emotional connection to people, places and things. Tourism experiences are especially well communicated in a multimedia storytelling format (Yoo et al. 2011).

• Usability is paramount for both content creation and usage. Tips, ideas and guides are provided to simplify UGC creation. Extensive UGC blog filtering tools are provided. The extensive support for other Social Media platform (Google Maps, Flickr, YouTube, content feeds), enables greater content reach. Furthermore, TDC campaigns leverage other social media platforms with special offers, contest and events. Volo notes that DMOs should encourage repeated visitations to Blogs and the cross-usage of social media platforms. HelloBC also has extensive user privacy protection policies with opt-in/out for contact, unsubscribing and information request.
• In addition to engaging all of its community, TBC actively sought out and leveraged key social media influencers.
• Field Reports feature Video-Multimedia content targeted at generating Buzz - awareness, discussion and site traffic - of a particular offering or experience. Field reporters had some level of video technology proficiency (to generate a UGC style Youtube Video). They were contest winners, influencers and others who were passionate about BC. The reporter and other stakeholders would typically blog on-board and off-board to amplify the Buzz.
• Field Reports feature Video-Multimedia content targeted at generating Buzz - awareness, discussion and site traffic - of a particular offering or experience. Field reporters had some level of video technology proficiency (to generate a UGC style Youtube Video). They were contest winners, influencers and others who were passionate about BC. The reporter and other stakeholders would typically blog on-board and off-board to amplify the Buzz.

                                       

• 2010 Winter Olympics feature multimedia content generated around the world class event. Influencer blogging helped to raise Buzz. Pre-Olympic events included Twitter contest with Olympic ticket prizes. Twitter was a key tool to engage and to make event and general planning recommendations to followers. According to Volo, Tweetdeck was a key tool used to keep track of follower profiles. HelloBC succeed in tripling its Twitter following.
• Podcast feature event and tourism related events from local communities
• Tips From Travellers and Tip from Us enable visitors, residents, and stakeholders to propose and post informal traveller styled blog entries covering travel stories and experiences. The site has clear non-promotional policies and other posting policies as well as posting aids as described earlier.

Finally, Volo notes that although the amount of viral marketing generated was enormous, “the full exploitation of these efforts, through monitoring and measuring of the results are still under investigations.”  This view is consistent with the rapidly evolving state of both DMOs, specifically and with Social Media Metrics in general.

What is next?

The industry has leveraged analytics to benefit from all that information produced by customers. Analytics have helped find ways to present the data in a way that facilitates the customer’s life without influencing results as to preserve trust/credibility. For example, besides the average hotel rating, a review site could show rating inflection points over time. Let’s say that due to change in management the average rating of Hotel X drops from 4.5 starts to 4.3 in two months; looking only at the average over a long period of time will hide the fact that Hotel X presented a 2 starts ranting for the last 2 months. As business continue to place high priority on strategic performance tools such as the balanced scorecard, these ratings and consumer feedback have and will continue to prove to be useful in defining and evaluation consumer satisfaction metrics.  Consumers would like to know their comments and rating are taken seriouslyand that root causes are identified. This will keep T2.0 providers busy searching for small innovation increments.

Tourism 3.0, as the analogy suggests, will piggy back on WEB 3.0 concepts:

Web Semantics is a fundamental block of T3.0 which will make possible for web sites to identify relationships between independent pages’ contents. So if one site contains the entry Rio de Janeiro is in Brazil and another site tell Carnival happens in Rio de Janeiro the programs will be able to identify the relationship between these pages and web searches will be way more effective and efficient.  The question “I live in Ottawa and I want to plan a trip to watch a Soccer World Cup game and the Carnival” could generate way better results than it will today.

The focus on Mobile is truly expanding. Ubiquitous computing and the innovation that is accompanying it, such as the “Generically called “software-only positioning,” Skyhook’s new replacement for (or supplement to) GPS takes advantage of the prevalence of wireless internet consumer products in cities” mentioned by Christian Sandvig – MIT press- Wireless Play and Unexpected Innovation, will create many more options for people to use social media.DMOs will proactively (or ultimately be forced to) climb the maturity stages to adjust to the rapidly evolving landscape of T2.0 and future T3.0.

According to Ian Yeoman “The traveler will want more in less time or with less effort – this has implications for everything from the format of events through to booking processes and the nature of breaks.”

Authors: Glauco Barcotti, Robert Chan and Natalie Strittmatter

References:

Bakker William (2011) TG4 Interview. Accessed on July 14, 2012. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQfqTSBCzzQ

Bakker William Personal Blogs (2012) Accessed on July 14, 2012. http://www.wilhelmus.ca/

Bakker William/Think!Social Media (2012) 5 levels of social media sophistication at the DMO. Accessed on July 14, 2012. http://thinksocialmedia.com/2012/04/5-levels-of-social-media-sophistication-at-the-dmo/

Budd Stephen (2009) Travel and Web 3.0 - What Does This Mean?. January 2 2009. http://blog.highlandbusinessresearch.com/2008/12/11/travel-and-web-30-what-does-this-mean/

Cordiner Len (2012) The Travel 3.0 Era. http://www.localtravelmovement.com/238/the-travel-3-0-era-%E2%80%93-local-travel/

Etlinger Susan (2011) A Framework for Social Analytics. Altimeter Group

Grossman David I2007) Travel 2.0: Social networking takes a useful turn. USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/travel/columnist/grossman/2007-01-26-grossman_x.htm

Hays Stephanie, Page Stephen John, Buhalis Dimitrios (2012) Social media as a destination marketing tool: its use by national tourism organizations. Rutledge

HelloBC Website (2012) Accessed on July 14, 2012. http://www.HelloBC.com

Sigala Marianna, Christou Evangelos, TEI Alexander, Gretzel Ulrike (2012). Social Media in Travel, Tourism and Hospitality: Theory, Practice and Cases. Ashgate

Santos Stacey (2012). 2010 Social Media and Tourism Industry Statistics. Stikky Media -http://www.stikkymedia.com/articles/2012-social-media-and-tourism-industry-statistics

Wollan Robert, Smith Nick, Zhou, Catherine (2011) The Social Media Management Handbook, John Wiley & Sons, Inc

World Travel Market (2011). The World Travel Market (WTM) Industry Report and Global Trends Report. http://www.wtmlondon.com/page.cfm/link=47

Yoo K H, Gretzel Ulrike (2011) Influence of personality on travel-related consumer-generated media creation. Computers in Human Behavior 609-621

[i] “Social Media in Travel, Tourism and Hospitality:  Theory, Practice and Cases” has 35 leading Tourism and related Social Media industry contributors (both practitioners and academics) and is edited by industry experts Drs Sigala, Christou, and Getzel.

Creating value with successful WEBINARS

Traditional seminars are recognized as a very effective tool to build business relationships, build a brand and generate sales. Webinars offer the same advantages without the costs and time spend in travelling. Thus it is easier to target a great number of customers in an interactive way. Webinars are held “in live” on a topic that is of particular interest to the company’s target audience. They allow an important interaction during the event and when recorded, after it.

The best way to increase your webinar’s success is to generate value for your consumers.

Top_Ten_Webinar_Best_Practices-2009.pdf

An Osterman Research White Paper

 You generate value by:

• Offering interesting information about your products, the industry trends, the technologies, the forecasts, the risks and issue etc.
• Communicating with accuracy prior to the event the goal and the content of your webinar.
• Allowing and encouraging questions and interactions with the public
• Keeping it short and easy to understand. It should last less than one hour.
• Closing with a wrap-up with contact information and a clear call-to-action
• Offering something valuable at the end of the event, for example some valuable download or a gift. (Sales insider, 2012)

You make it successful and entertaining by:

• Considering a different format (talk show, panel discussion, point-counterpoint, etc.)
• Having presenters talking with enthusiasm and passion for the subject
• Inviting a guest speaker and have more than one presenter
• Interacting with real time polling and Q&A

• Bolstering your presentation with real time demonstration, video and digital clip. Limit any clips to no more than 30 seconds. 

Top_Ten_Webinar_Best_Practices-2009.pdf
An Osterman Research White Paper

Make sure to capture value by :

• Increasing the number of participants through efficient promotional strategy
• Linking the webinar event with all you other marketing tools and social media channels
•   Set up a Twitter hash tag for the event
•   Create a Facebook and a LinkedIn Event
•    Post the program and the background of the speakers on your blog
• Leveraging your recorded content: Add it to your blog, and to your YouTube account, share the link on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
• Doing a quick follow-up : sending a thank you mail with the slides and interesting links. Send the recorded content to the no-show.
• Making the interaction to last after the event: Follow-up on any questions not answered during live event and on the main question raised. Encourage people to keep posting questions on you social channels and provide quick and professional answers.
• Measuring your success and ask for feedback

To conclude Webinars are a great tool that can be easily integrated into your social media and marketing strategy. They can help you to build your brand and to be considered as an expert by your clients and your peers. They foster the level of interaction you have with your prospect and clients. You will be able to communicate on your products but also to learn more about the expectations, the concerns and the issue from your consumers. You will develop your on-line presence, the trust and the satisfaction. As we say, practice makes perfect so get started.

For more information here are the main sources of this article :

Top 10 Webinar Best Practices : An Osterman Research White Paper
Webinar Best Practices, Readytalk
Best Practices in Webinars They can and will provide great sales leads, if … PixionPictureTalk
Best Practices for Interactive Webinars on http://www.nationalserviceresources.org
Fripp, P.  Add Impact When You Present ThroughWebinars. Communication Briefing

Igor T.

Dell Ideastorm: Groundbreaking crowdsourcing platform, atrophy, and 2012 renewal

In February 2007, Dell launched a groundbreaking ideation (and community engagement) crowdsourcing platform called Ideastorm.   In 2012, Dell updated Ideastorm in response to a community challenge to re-engage.  This story highlights that a company’s Social Media Strategy involves continuous engagement and renewal as well as rigor.   Robert Wollan et al. argue that rigor, part of the 5th “P” (People) of a Social Media enabled Marketing Mix, involves consistency and reliability of a company’s operations and how those operations deliver the right customer experience via Social Media.

Since Jeff Howe coined the “crowdsourcing” term in 2006, there has been a proliferation of applications and business models leveraging the “power of the crowd.”  Open Innovations and Ross Dawson provide good market mappings.    A number of corporations, ranging from Lego, Threadless, Starbucks, and Dell operate platforms targeted at engaging their customers for product, services and brand feedback.  The potential values include (1) greater customer involvement, engagement and Loyalty, (2) timely and richer, direct customer feedback, (3) higher granularity customer insight, and (4) access to new sources of ideas, potentially customer brainstormed.   

Ideastorm, essentially an online suggestion box, was unique when it launched during the early days of Social Media.  It was viewed as a bold, groundbreaking corporate initiative - enabling customers to openly engage Dell and each other (providing both negative and positive Dell feedback).  It was built on Salesforce.com’s Ideas platform and featured an ideas voting/tagging system which was novel at the time.   Voting enabled community based ideas filtering.  An initially skeptical, Howe, would even later gush about Dell’s success.   Some of the key issues (loss of control concerns, change management, leadership involvement, competitive intelligence issues, ROI, etc.) for Social Media strategies highlighted by Wollan et al. are addressed in Dell’s Vida Killian video and written interviews.  Some success contributors included CEO drive (it was Michael Dell’s idea), Dell’s Direct to Customer Culture, and Dell’s Social Media culture change underway to address its earlier Dell Hell and related publicity fiascos that inflicted reputational and financial damage.  Negative or positive conversations were going to happen with our without Dell.  It was better to be involved.   Ideastorm was part of a Social Media strategy that ultimately would see Dell named 2011’s #1 most social brand of 100 top brands.   Over the 4 years since its inception, Ideastorm generated 15,000 idea submissions, 490 of which were implemented resulting in $100s of Millions ($10,000 average value per idea).  Members generated approximately 50% more revenue than non-members with over 50% in the top decile of LTV scores.



Six Years of Experiments and Experience
(Source:  B. Johnston, Dell)

 

As Dell slowly shifted focus from its on-board platforms, Ideastorm became a victim of its own success.   Dell’s participation waned, the platform atrophied, and ideas piled up.   Many diehard members stayed, engaging each other despite Dell.  Advocates turned into critics.  Dell’s Bill Johnston notes that “They thought that Dell had become disrespectful.”   Dell took notice.  End-Of-Life or renewal?   An analysis of corporate benefits and customer needs resulted in the March 2012 launch of an updated Ideastorm.   The platform was modernized including better profile integration with other Social Media platforms.  New tools were introduced to improve voting, idea triaging, idea archival, and idea evolution (iteration and mashups).  Better contributor recognition was introduced including from the Dell Community Rockstar program.  Most importantly, the backend process was improved with greater Dell Idea Partners involvements - more Dell representatives as well as 28 corporate partners, that represent various stakeholder divisions. Dell even hired one of its advocate-turned-critic to help improve community engagement.




Ideastorm 2.0 Platform
(Source:  B. Johnston, Dell)

Ideastorm 2.0:  Updated Idea Management Process
(Source:  B. Johnston, Dell)
Note:  Ideastorm 2.0 incorporated some SBUX best practices.  Ironically, Michael Dell had earlier shared his experiences with Howard Schultz to help them build SBUX's mystarbucksidea platform.  Both use Saleforce.com's Ideas platform.

 

Twitter is useful for Business

Twitter - not only for personal status updates

Twitter is mentioned a lot in the news, but in my experience, many people still have that cliche of twitter expressed with “I don’t care what someone ate for lunch or where he is going right now!” phrase.

So, I was surprised to find out that Twitter has some unique features, extremely useful for businesses. The applications can range from announcements to promoting your blog posts and press releases to monitoring the information about your industry. And in each of these applications, Twitter offers some unbeatable advantages compared to other channels.

A bit steep learning curve

Twitter has it's own lingo, and culture. I did open Twitter account and was not using it for couple of years. It's not like Twitter is lacking on the growth, but viewing the instruction video as the one below, would save you from a lot of friction with this tool. Twitter’s own Best Practices for businesses provide short and clear list of things that will put your company on a good track with Twitter.

Applications for Twitter in Business world

Super fast announcements

Restaurant or other business could post their specials. Posting rebates codes will keep your followers in high alert state. Besides, the open nature of Twitter allows for infinite retweets (if the deal is super attractive). Some goods that have expiration date, such as tickets to events or travel can be pushed through this channel with great success. Announcing the new location or time for any temporary sales or service points is another possible venue.

Reaching out to your customers

Sending a tweet with a simple question may not substitute the full blown marketing study, but you are getting very valuable feedback directly from your existing or potential customers in minutes, not days or months.

Be a source of relevant content

Sometimes, it is hard to find knowledgeable stuff to write a lot of text, but with Twitter you do not need that. The tweet is 140 characters long, and considering the link, and couple of hashtags - it's even shorter.
You are probably aware of the market environment, new trends and there's something you can do to become a source of relevant information for your followers. Send the links to the content that you find relevant to your industry and your company might become a trusted authority in a field. Next time you put the press release out - there will be more people actually reading it.

Monitoring what's happening out there

You can use search to get real time comments about your brand, company and competitors. It is possible to get this information right to your desktop or smartphone and have an opportunity to respond. Applications such as TweetDeck make the task easier by storing the search query and keeping it updated.
You can monitor the competitors as well, and use any opportunities to acquire new customers or respond to strategic moves. Other technologies might slow you down by days, and in today's world - it's might as well be forever.
If the other businesses and people you are dealing with have Twitter accounts - chances are you can find the talking points in their tweets and increase your chances to strike the right chords and make a sale or seal the partnership.

Practical advice to get started

The topic of Twitter for Businesses is quite popular today and there's a lot of great resources with more detailed information. Here are several resources that I find very clear and useful on a subject:

• Aaron Lee's - 10 Reasons Why Your Business Should Use Twitter 
• Jeff Bullas' - 37 Ways to Use Twitter for Business
• Practical guidelines for Twitter from Flyte New Media 

The infographic at the right provides some useful hints how to make sure your tweets are seen by more people (click on it to see bigger version). Stats indicate that posting during the day or on the weekend, using hashtags and asking for retweat when appropriate can significantly increase the reach of your messages.

Why Twitter and music industry are dependent on each other?

Particularly in last 2 decades, there have been lots of changes in the music industry as well as in the ways we find and listen to music: from cassettes to mp3s, from radios to online music streaming platforms. Below is a nice animated infographic from Digital Cowboys showing the world of digital music:

Especially with the booming of social media, it became a lot easier to discover new musicians, to follow your favorite artists and to keep in touch with them. Here is another interesting infograph by MusicMetric showing the trends after SXSW - South by South West 2012 festival where all new talent are presented and promoted.

Back in the time, Myspace was a lot of help to discover new talent and follow your favorite musicians but there are other social media tools replacing it now. Such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, SoundCloud, Beatport, Pandora, etc. There are many services being provided to fans and musicians too. For instance, last year Foursquare signed a partnership with British Songkick to enable fans to check in not only to places but also to events, gigs or concerts.


Among all these tools, Twitter has a key role for musicians and their fans. Twitter defines itself as "the next best thing to being backstage for music fans" in a guide they prepared for musicians and artists. In October 2011, Twitter transferred Tatiana Simonian from Disney Music Group and appointed her as the Head of Music Industry Relations for Twitter. This was almost at the same time they launched Twitter Music. Twitter certainly pays special attention to music industry and is aware that music is a key industry for growth. During International Music Summit 2012 held in Ibiza, Ms Simonian had a key note speech. These are the highlights:

50% of all users on Twitter follow at least 1 musician... 87% of Billboard top 100 are on Twitter... The top 5 most followed accounts on Twitter are musicians... The hashtag EDM* is now used up to 3,000 times a day. It is the fastest growing genre.

However it isn't only musicians and fans need social media tools, the tools need them too. According to a recent article from The Wall Street Journal, social media platforms are heavily dependent on music fans for growth. As a proof to this, Twitter Counter reports that 7 out of top 10 followed accounts belong to musicians. Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Rihanna and Britney Spears are the top 5 followed celebrities on Twitter. FYI, Barack Obama is the 6th.

Twitter is encouraging the musicians to use Twitter as a main tool to communicate with their fans. Within the guide, they give such advises:

• Include photos in your tweets
• Create hashtags for your tours
• Reply to your fans

It's interesting to see that the only reason Twitter cares about musicians isn't the growth. They are making money out of this. According to TechCrunch, Twitter signed a partnership with 3 music data services at the beginning of 2012 and will distribute tweets of verified musician accounts to be integrated into consumer apps.

At the end, it's a mutual relationship between musicians and Twitter. For musicians, Twitter isn't only about being discovered and followed by fans but also a way to connect with other artists and bands too. As John Paul Titlow from ReadWriteWeb explains, "For musicians today, especially smaller, independent artists, not taking full advantage of the social Web is a huge missed opportunity".


*EDM stands for Electronic Dance Music.

social media tools in China

Whether the company is starting out, just starting to turn a profit or already on the verge of an acquisition, as an entrepreneur he will be constantly evaluating the tools that will help get his business to the next stage.

Even if the business is still using the ink as the most often style, they want to be equipped with the social media tools that will play an important role in company communication, product and brand promotions, and business development for the startup.

As I come from China, I have some idea about the social media in my country. In China, there are many social media tools, such as RenRen, QQ, Weibo. Most people use these tools to communicate with family, friends even strangers. At the beginning, the most part of the customers are young people. But now it has been developed to the life of every people. Not only the young like to use social media, but also the older people use the media keeping connect with others and getting to know the world.

After the booming development, social media is becoming more and more popular and important. With the rising number of user, many companies take part in the social media to extend their business.

Companies branding can get obvious benefits using social media. Whether users directly engage with the brand or not, they will still see the brand’s name within the networks they use. The more impressions a consumer gets of business, the more likely he will remember the company’s name in the future. And also social media can provide support to customers. It is vital to the success of any business and social media is no exception to the rule. When a person reaches out to you, whether their input is good or bad it is extremely important to respond in a timely and helpful manner. Social media provides the platform for consumers to interact on a person to person level, so that they aren’t talking to a faceless representative over the phone or via email. Respond whenever a user reaches out, just not to users acting profane, misleading or hateful. Providing this level of service, which can be something as simple as thanking someone for mentioning the brand, is completely transparent to the entire network, showing how dedicated the companies are to their audience?

In any business it is really important to keep pace with their competitors and get to know everything about the same service the company also have. Social media merely makes this process easier by allowing for complete transparency of the content and conversations their competitors are having on their various social accounts. Social media can help keeping company on track with other non-profits, businesses, publications or whoever the company interested in keeping tabs on or on the other side of the fence looking to partner with in the future for a promotion, campaign or some other type of partnership.

In my opinion, it is a platform for the customers and companies to communicate. It is an information era now. In this life style, social is the real media, life is the best communication. Business can get more success using the social media in the real life.