Marketers need to cut through the social media noise

Social media is both a blessing and a curse for marketers. On the one hand, it's a potentially efficient channel to listen to, influence and reward customers as well as prospects. On the other, it's an increasingly noisy, cluttered and time-consuming medium to manage.

Up until now, marketers have lacked the applications and processes they have needed to make social media work for them as part of their eCRM strategies.

Most of the tools on the market have been geared towards functions such as online reputation management and customer support rather than marketing.

This picture has changed with the arrival of mature processes and technologies that help marketers to harness the benefits of social media without allowing it to turn into an unmanageable and time draining task. These tools are highly focused in nature.

They are designed to make it quicker and easier for marketers to engage with their audiences, measure their success in connecting with customers and prospects, and build up social profiles of the people engaging with and influencing their brands.

The technology will make a major difference for marketers by helping them to see through the noise of social media content and interactions and separate that which really matters to them from the clutter. It prevents social media from turning into a burden.

A good social media app for marketers will usually form a part of an integrated eCRM suite that gives the ability to seamlessly manage customer relationships across the Web, mobile, email and social media channels.

It should enable marketers to gather information about customers and prospects in the social media world and use it intelligently to drive new business. So what does this mean in practice?

Firstly, the tool should offer a clean interface that gives marketers all the user and engagement data that they need for their eCRM strategies and nothing else.

The application should allow marketers to see their own social media content and the responses it is generating in real-time with a single glance. It should yield data for every post that allows the marketer to see how successful each post or tweet is by the replies, re-tweets, likes, and clicks it attracts.

The tool should also enable marketers to see what customers are saying about their brands and companies independently of marketer-initiated content.

This is important because marketers need to understand how engaged the audience is on its own and how much influence their content and interactions has on the audience.

In addition, marketers need tools that allow them to build social profiles of those who contribute or engage with the brand, so that the important people start to stand out and can be rewarded or influenced. Social profiles can take a range of attributes such as Klout ranking or followers into account and can be segmented using a wide range of criteria.

Some of these engagers may be customers, some might be prospects, and some may never spend a thing with the company.  But the important influencers may reach hundreds or thousands of people, and one may need to try and influence or reward them.

For marketers, social media should form part of an eCRM strategy that allows them to track influencers, customers and campaigns across multiple digital channels. Social media is just a part of the mix of channels that customers use. To maximise influence and drive new sales, one needs to capitalise on opportunities to engage across a number of channels.