After seeing this title you're probably saying to yourself "there is no way I can save money by hiring someone else to my company!" Well, that is where you are wrong! Here are a list of ways a SMMM can save you money!
1. Slowing employee turnover and lowering recruitment costs: it costs time and money to hire employees. Social networks help with recruiting costs and time. You can do this by recruiting from within your network. Target the people you are in regular contact with or asking your site for help finding qualified applicants. Now when you hire, have not just saved yourself time and money, you have also brought someone in to the company that wants to be their.
2. Bringing down customer service costs: social media cuts customer service costs by helping customers directly through your companies social network. This in turn will make it so that you need less customer service agents. The cost of paying someone overseas to answer expensive phone calls is far more expensive than answering someone via facebook or Twitter. A couple of companies are doing this really well, Comcast and cisco systems. Comcast used Comcast cares through there twitter to save on expenses. Cisco saved themselves around $5 million a year by doing so. (article by Brian Solis)
3. Product design and marketing costs can be cut in half: I'm sure you already know that social media is a cheap way to market a product, but you may not have known that through social media you can get people to design your advertisements and market your products for you. Also, you can have people from your network and other niche networks design products for you. Who knows better than the customer, what they want to see. IBM used this tactic and it worked out well for them.
4. Increase sales through customer reviews: This is done by allowing customers to post reviews on your company pages. The marketer can then allow the person to post there review on the site they purchased the product on or ask the person if the company may use the comment. More often than not, customers will allow you to use there review. This in turn will help with the sale of your reviewed product. Also, it can make it so that those who purchase the product will be less likely to return it.
5. Cheap pr and advertising: As I talked about before in previous posts, your SMMM can heal relationships with potentially unhappy customers. This cuts down on the costs for pr representatives. Advertising can also be used less on tv, magazine ads, and other types of old media. You can use Paid and unpaid advertising through your social network. This is becoming more and more popular.
By Rand Owens