The role of social media in managing customer relationship Essay

The role of social media in managing customer relationship - Essay Example The essay will encompass the role of social media in managing customer relationships. At the current epoch modern business firms face cut throat competition among themselves. Most of the contemporary economies in the world abide by the free market principles. ‘Consumerism’ is the pivotal goal or motto of almost all the enterprises in the modern world. Business firms can never be successful in generating economic surplus without enhancing and modifying customer relationships. Buyers view for a commodity or a service manufactured by a business firm largely influences the brand loyalty and image of the company. This in turn affects the gross turnover of the organization. Thus, implementing strategies to win over customer relationships is the primary success factor for any corporate business organization. With the progress and development of Information Technology, business firms have enjoyed substantial economic surplus with the help of the modern marketing methodologies. S ocial Media is a tool that has upgraded and modified itself over time to help business organizations built efficient and good customer relations. Social media involves certain internet sites that help the people freely communicate with each other through writings, videos and pictures. With the advantages of social media, constrains like distance and time differentials have reduced to a large extent. Modern individuals can never think of a life without the social networking sites. In the late 19th century, the CompuServe was the first social network site available in United States. Over the time, the percentage of internet users has significantly increased. The modern social networking sites like YouTube have 4 billion viewers per day. Facebook users are as high as 1.11 billion. 255 million users for LinkedIn, 87 million members for Flickr, 500 million users for Twitter shows the gross popularity of social networking sites in the modern world. Such sites are used for both economic an d non economic purposes. Modern business firm’s uses social networking sites for marketing their manufactured products and achieving customer’s loyalty. Customer Relationship Management is a pivotal theory of consumer behaviour management. Social media has largely helped the corporate retail firms to anticipate the requirements and demands of the contemporary potential customers. Thus, at this juncture it is highly rational to analyze the role of social media in facilitating corporate customer relationships. This essay will enumerate the various aspects and perspectives of social media. It will also throw light on the superior and inferior outcomes generated by social media over time. The learnt from this academic based essay would surely enable readers to acquire an implicit knowledge about the benefits and problems of social media augmenting customer relations. Critical analysis Impact of social media on customer relations The discussion presented above shows that th e social media is a platform that is rising in importance among the marketers. In this context, it must be understood that the social media has both positive and negative impacts on consumer relationship. The positive impacts have been discussed below followed by the negative impacts. Social media as a public forum provides a strong way to establish customer relationship and increasingly engage them into the process of designing, producing and distributing products. There is a huge difference between social media and other forms of communication, such as telephones. The difference is that telephones provide one to one communication among the people that are participating in the conversation, but the social media is such a forum in which a very large number of people that are virtually present in the forum can participate in the conversation. This allows all customers to review the opinions of other consumers. Thus, it makes the information conveyed across the target population very fast and also allows the companies