Why Does Listen Use Social Media?

I have been asked several times how Listen uses social media. Maybe a more important question is: why does Listen use social media?

Listen is new to social media. We began this adventure in July 2009. In the beginning we didn’t fully understand what all the hype was about with social media. However, as we did more research and looked at the benefits – our eyes opened up. What we figured out is that social media could accomplish the following (I’ll explain in greater detail below):

1. Allows our organization to better explain our solutions to the world.
2. Provides an ongoing library of relevant and discoverable content.
3. Provides an informal way to have conversations with customers.
4. Social media allows us to be more prolific in developing new content.
5. Helps search engines to find us so our customers can find us.

Let me explain in more detail:
 

1. Allows our organization to better explain our solutions to the world. Our company focuses on five solution categories for assistive listening, tour groups, language interpretation, soundfield and conferencing. With social media we can go more in-depth in our solutions and explain them in an informal way that makes it easy to understand. And since we can include images, videos and links, we can cross-reference these discussions with other relevant information.
2. Provides an ongoing library of relevant and discoverable content. The really cool thing about this blog site is that content that is put up – stays up and can be referenced in the future. You can find it multiple ways including through search engines, tags and categories. For example we developed a blog post that explains how to program FM receivers. Now, this information is accessible at any time in the future. BTW, we have an IR receiver programming post coming soon.
3. Provides an informal way to have conversations with customers. Much of what is found on our web site and our collateral information is formal in nature. What I mean by this is that web content must go through our marketing team and strict graphic standards must be adhered to. Thus, the content is presented in a very clean and formal way. Well, with social media, we can present information that’s not so cleaned up. In fact, for most social media it’s unacceptable to be formal. When we present the content it’s more of a conversation and we shy away from selling. We mostly talk about what the benefits are of our products and how they can help people. On top of this, blogging allows for comments that engages and provides a means of having conversations.
4. Social media allows us to be more prolific in developing new content. One of the problems with a web site that to put up new content takes time and resources because it must go through a detailed workflow process. With social media, relevant content can be created and published quickly. This allows us as an organization to be much more prolific in creating new content.
5. Helps search engines to find us so our customers can find us. For most of us, when we need something we Google it or use a similar search engine. These search engines go out to social media and collect key words. So for our organization, our social media content gets picked up by the search engine. And thus, when someone needs a tour group solution for example, they can find Listen.

We are finding that our traffic to our blog site growing consistently each month. Our goal is to continue to develop interesting, relevant content that can be used today and referenced tomorrow. Your ideas and suggestions for blog posts are welcomed. Please feel free to email me Russell.Gentner@Listentech.com or leave a comment here. Also, if you would like to be a contributor to our blog post, let me know.