Social Media to Improve the Internal Communication - Free Samples

Question: Discuss about the Social Media to Improve Internal Communication. Answer: Introduction This study deals with the concept of Social media as it is plays a major role in improving business communication, both in the external sector and in the internal sector. Some of the popular social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook have helped the companies in building a strong communication with the customers through their technical support (Atanassova and Clark, 2015). Each and every people today are social media user in their personal life. Everyone has an account and uses this source as the main source of communication in their personal life. Hence, it has proved to be one of the most effective ways to communicate with the customers. A lot can be said of using social media in improving the internal communication as well. Companies are using this platform to communicate with their staffs and building a work environment which includes collaboration. This report studies the different uses of social media in the business culture. It points out the exact uses and the exact ways of using it effectively, the pitfalls of using it. Social Media Uses in the Business Sector There are lots of uses of this social media sectors like the external and the internal uses. They can be described here like: Uses of social media in external communication: Business houses in many sectors are using social media in their customer dealing operations like keeping a track in their demands and other things (Constantiou and Kallinikos, 2015). Customers use social media in an extreme level nowadays and many want the companies they are dealing to communicate with them through this media. The Nation Wide Built Society is known as the mutual society which is the largest in UK with more than 15 million customers and members. They are the first to start the retail internet banking service. With customer demand, they have adopted digital technologies to support them and are matured in digital technologies (Cornelissen and Cornelissen 2017). There are various other using examples of these sectors. The internet shopping sites are one of them. It provides shopping varieties with their sites and records the preferences of the customers. They use this record for their reference purposes. They also keep tracking their customer preferences through lots of questionnaires (Csikszentmihalyi and Sawyer 2014). Questions regarding their preferences, Quality criteria, demands are harnessed in these questionnaires. Near about all the retailers nowadays are using this internet shopping techniques. Baby product companies like Pampers are using this social media network to engage with their targeted customers. They have their blog sites and website pages. They keep engaging their customers in lots of life events through their sites. The maternal needs and conversation with the new moms are also carried through these sites. Entertainment sites like Netflix are using this method for business development. They note down the customer searches. They also communicate their offers to their customers through their social sites Dahnil et al. 2014). And the research for selecting these offers is also done to a large extent through this sites. There is lots of example of this social media use by the business houses in each and every sector for their exter nal communication. Uses of social media in internal communication The business houses are using social media to improve their internal business culture. It is an important criteria to reach to all the staff and talk to them about their work. This part is most managed by the social media scenario. They are being mostly connected through groups and that make the most effective use of time and resources. Not only is this, the communication strategy formed by the business houses also generally carried on by the social media process. They use this media to communicate their strategy message and deal with employees. The board meetings are also being discussed in the soc9al media pages. An example for this purpose can be sited for the business house like Grant Thornton. They have used the social media way to deal with their internal members. They had completely changed the process in which their people used to interact internally (Grant 2016). The companys working culture has changed drastically and they have changed from one of the risk aversion company. The company got support from the top ladder like the board of directors and the CEO of it. The social media platform for them made the work culture sound easy rather than heavy. But there is lots of pitfall for this media use. This can easily lead to the misuse of the media. The company has come with the ten rules for using social media and those are just described as common sense (Kane 2015). They have also created a center of excellence to provide training o the user and to provide support. There are few worries regarding the use of social media which can invite social worries as well as legal hassles. The use of the social media should go with aim and the objectives of the company. They should not be misused here as well. So there should remain a little bit of caution. There are lots of points or aspects that can be followed while using social media for both the internal uses and the external uses. Some of the points are listed below with proper justification: Content planning for the Social Media Channels: The media presences should ensure a consistent posting and frequent postings as well the content should remain planned from before or may be from 2 to 3 weeks. The things should be mapped out clearly and the companys social media handling team should discuss matters in beforehand without any scope of confusion (Krombholz et al., 2015). Less confusion transmits into a better media handling. Categories can be established for the posts like Promotional content, Product Related, Internal Employees and all. They can make the messages more clear and evident and can save a lot of time that can be invested in other works (Kwon, Lee and Shin, 2014). It should be remembered as well that seeing the contents in a clear way and categorized way is also a stress busters for the people seeing it like the company people and for the customers as well. Making an active involvement and the company departments: It is important to involve in active engagement by the employees where they can communicate easily and share their feedback to other Departments and Senior Department. Whether regarding the clients or regarding the employees, for multiple clients or for multiple employees, it is a very important aspect to make the clients or the employees more involved in the social media aspect from the very beginning. The most important thing in the online environment is time. Time cannot be wasted in anyways. This is the reason why involvements of the right people from the very beginning can make the process more streamlined and maintain the proper work flow which can save time to a great extend. The social media can also be used to as a platform to get acquaintance with clients views like their approval for posting, making suggestions, deciding whether a posting should get published and also planning and scheduling the upcoming posts and events with the team. This discussion with the team and the clients can ensure that the best and the most effective posts are going online (Levenshus and Lemon, 2017). This is also helpful in providing answers to the customer questions and confusions. Personal helps can be provided through this media whenever people need it regarding dealing with not so important or personal responses. Sharing a platform for using the Social Media channels There should be structured overview of the social media means no more juggling between the different tabs of the social media platforms (Levenshus and Lemon, 2017). The general social media using means a lot of tabs for the different users remain open for the different groups and using a lot of passwords, lots of logins and log outs and like stuffs. A structured overview of the whole scenario helps in the whole logging in using of the server process. The structured overview can be done dashboards. Dashboard allows the users to manage all the stuffs from a single post with lots of logging in sessions and logging out and switching and sharing passwords. The mostly used social media site are like Twitter, Face book, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+ and all. They can be handled together through the process. The office environment can make the use of few other sites through this dashboard process as well. Another important part is monitoring the conversations. The dashboards also allow assign p ermission for these monitoring and related stuffs. The most important aspect of this social media using is not to repeat any content that anybody else has already used. Monitoring makes this easy and permissions for monitoring are important. Setting notifications for new tweets, replies and private messages If not necessary but it is very important to set notifications for the tweets, email notifications and stuffs (Oyza and Edwin, 2015). It is a very important point to remain available all the time while using the social media platform and that too without going mad. Another thing is that if any of the team members is facing an issue, then another team member should be the one deal with problem rather than anyone else. Urgent matters need immediate attentions. A free flow or a certain flow of the media use depends on the solving process of urgent matters. Finding solutions in a very short time is a very important point to be maintained (Rokka et al., 2014). The media management team should stay in the top of the whole process through ticket inbox This inbox adds up all the activities in the social media channels and set them in a common platform so as to deal with it with an ease (Rothaermel 2015). This makes the team members know what exactly their tasks are and help those sorting things out. The inbox enables one to manage tall the messages with proper care (Sekaran and Bougie 2016). Conclusion It can be concluded from the whole report that social media can be proved to a very strong platform for ensuring business development. It helps in the internal sector as well as the external sector. The internal sectors can be like communicating between the whole employee group, implication of communication strategies and all and external factors are like communicating with the targeted customers, engaging the customers, extracting feedback for future works and all. But the social media sector had some loophole as well they can attract legal issue with a few of the misuses and all other matters can get involved which will create problems. Hence, the media should be used with proper care. There can be a few ways to work in social media platform. They are like creating a dashboard with all the quite together to provide with an ease while using the media, setting notification. References Atanassova, I. and Clark, L., 2015. Social media practices in SME marketing activities: A theoretical framework and research agenda.Journal of customer behaviour,14(2), pp.163-183. Constantiou, I.D. and Kallinikos, J., 2015. 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