Rumen Vyrbanov
The Business Potential of Social Media Platforms
Summary:
Web 2.0 technologies have changed the business environment and have become a ‘must’ of any business strategy, whether it is a large company or a small and medium-sized enterprise.
Modern social media have a lot of sophisticated tools and technologies that can be successfully used to attract new customers, promote brand (recognizable identity for our product or service), boost sales, increase a company’s website traffic, build effective customer relationships, manage online reputation, facilitate communication with customers, incl. online, optimize search engines, etc. However, at the same time, social media are not just a collection of new tools and technologies – they develop and establish new business models, and require that managers and business owners have a lot of new knowledge and a new way of thinking.
In the social media environment small enterprises can successfully compete with large companies, regardless of the different advertising and marketing budgets. Although modest, the existing experience shows that with an adequate viral campaign organized in the social Web space small and medium-sized enterprises can generate huge traffic to their sites, improve communications with customers and achieve greater sales.
This study attempts to offer practical solutions for using social media in business processes. It focuses on several questions:
• What the Web 2.0 potential is expressed in for businesses and what ad¬vantages it provides;
• What the specific characteristics of social Web space are that are important in the use of Web 2.0 for business purposes;
• What the content behind the term ‘social media’ is and what its business poten¬tial is;
• What the nature and scope of social media is and what reasons justify the huge interest of businesses in them in recent years;
• How Social Media Optimization (SMO) and Social Media Marketing (SMM) can be used in the interest of businesses.
The first part of the study examines the basic characteristics and specific features of the second generation of Web services contributing to the use of Web 2.0 for business purposes. According to the author the new way of interaction and the ease of integration that are characteristic of Web 2.0 are expected to make radical changes in corporate information systems (IS), and hence in the business of companies.
The second part analyzes the nature and manifestation of social media. It gives a brief overview of social media and describes their potential for the development of small and medium-sized businesses, concluding that social media tools can be used successfully to attract customers, increase traffic to the website, boost sales, promote the brand and form a target audience. However, at the same time social media are something more than business tools – they require a new way of thinking, a new ap¬proach to the business of the company and to customers, an orderly and reasoned strategy for working in the new social environment.
The third part presents the capabilities of the two new and still not widely used tools for the popularization of the site in the social media – Social Media Optimization (SMO) and Social Media Marketing (SMM). Companies that will migrate to Web 2.0 have to have a good understanding of SMM tools in order to be able to determine which of them are suitable for a particular business and how to approach their actual use. The author argues that the good performance of the site on the Web and providing more traffic today require an integrated approach in using the various techniques for digital and traditional marketing.
Rumen Vyrbanov
SOCIAL BUSINESS: USING WEB 2.0 AND SOCIAL NETWORKS
IN THE BUSINESS OF COMPANIES
Summary:
Over the recent years Web 2.0 has been at the forefront of high-tech tools and technologies that companies are seeking to use in their business processes. Web 2.0 has emerged as a new wave of business innovation that gives new dimensions to the Internet as a means of communication, cooperation and doing business.
This study examines the evolution of the Web in the context of opportunities for implementing technologies in companies’ businesses. Emphasis is placed on the second generation of Web technologies and the social business concept – the new opportunities for adapting and using the Web’s ideas and technologies in companies’ businesses. The nature and specific approaches and strategies of social business are presented as a new generation of technologies capable of achieving an increase in companies’ income and profits, seizing new market niches, as well as increasing sharply the labour productivity of employees and their incorporation into the main goals of the business.
The first part analyzes in brief the evolution of the Web technologies and their impact on the business of companies. The focus is on the nature and changes that the second and third generation of technologies (Web 2.0 and Web 3.0) impose on business processes.
The second part examines the priority areas for the application of social technologies in business: management of internal corporate communications, design and development of new products and knowledge management (Intranet environment); corporate communications and interactions with external partners and customers (Extranet environment, B2B model); e-commerce (online stores, B2C model). The practical possibilities of the three approaches for using the social networks in e-business are discussed: opening a representation (an online store) on Facebook or another social network, as an addition to the already existing traditional online store; online trading directly in the social network, without an online store; using the social networks as a complement and alternative to the search engines.
The third part of the study examines social business as an opportunity to use new social platforms for communication between companies and their customers. The nature of the new concept of social cooperation, which ultimately reflects in higher productivity and returns on investment, is analyzed. The author presents and analyzes several aspects of social business in a company’s activities – marketing in a Web 2.0 environment and working with clients of the company, interactions with business partners, personnel management and knowledge management in the company.
