Benefits of social media for profit and non-profit organizations
In today’s post I will be writing about the benefits of social media for profit and non-profit organizations. If you are curious to know what are some of the benefits of social media for your organization please keep reading.
Before listing benefits of social media for both profit and non-profit organizations it is necessary here to clarify exactly what is meant by social media in this article. Social media are websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.
To begin with, lets see how using social media can benefit for profit organizations. At profit organizations, social media should be involved in next five segments
The first segment is a sale, the purpose of profit organizations is to make a profit and social media can help organizations make a profit just like other communications cahannels and tools does. Social media in this segment can help by attracting new customers, achieving reach through marketing campaigns and promoting actions and discounts.
The second segment is customer service. Benefits of customer service are endless I will list some of them: feedback to customers, the ability to automatically reply to users, quick problem solving, expense reduction and satisfied customers.
The third segment are human resources. In context of human resources, social media help in profiling candidates, the purpose is to get a segmented customer or employee.
Next segment are public relations, at this segment social media have the biggest impact, because of their ability to measure communication on social media and to adapt the communications to the organizations goals and needs.
The last segment is smart management, because of internet and social media everything is easy to search and measure so smart management is now more effective, cheaper and faster than ever before.
In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the benefits of social media for non-profit organizations too. Some segments are called the same but they don’t have the same meaning, don’t let it confuse you.
The first segment is the outcome. Do you notice the difference between profit organizations and non-profit organizations? For non-profit organizations, the most important is the outcome, not the profit. Their purpose is to get the result, the outcome of some activity which is connected with some problem. Social media are the ideal platform on which non-profit organizations can gather to achieve their purpose.
The second segment is supported membership. In profit organizations we have customers and in non-profit organizations we have members. To the members of the organizations, we present messages and activities. The purpose of this segment is similar to the purpose of customer service in profit organizations. Support membership gives feedback to customers, they are able to automatically reply to users, spread the message and activities connected with some issue.
The third segment is called human resources, even though the third segment is called the same for profit and non-profit organizations it has a different meaning. In profit organizations, we want to get a segmented customer or employee and in non-profit organizations, we want to bring together a community of like-minded people who will see our message and then share it on social media.
Fourth segment are public relations and their purpose is the same in profit and non-profit organizations.
The last segment is once again called support membership. Mass media can create awareness of the problem, but they cannot create trust. To create trust we need to have time, and social media are the ideal platform on which non-profit organizations can share their message about some issue, their activities connected with that issue and they can stimulate the conversation and create trust between like-minded people.
I hope this post was informative and helpful. Also, I would like to know if you use social media in your organization? Did it benefit you? Please share your story and advice if you have in the comment section.
Author: Matea Brajković
Sources:
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/social_media
Lecture: The Use of Social Media for Business Purposes, University of Applied Sciences Vern’, 2017.