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Ron Callari

July 21, 2014

VoIP Your Social Media Marketing Plan

Social media marketing strategy is essential for small businesses today, and a VoIP service can help enhance your social footprint. For those who lack these online components, you've diminished your ability to compete aggressively in today's marketplace.

Social media marketing strategy is essential for small businesses today, and a VoIP service can help enhance your social footprint. For those who lack these online components, you’ve diminished your ability to compete aggressively in today’s marketplace. Companies are learning that a holistic marketing plan, which is user-focused and addresses the need of the consumer can distinguish your business from the competition.

VoIP extends Customer Reach

While social media is a beneficial tool for stimulating customer feedback via tweets and status updates on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, a small business or even a larger brand can only keep those conversations alive for short intervals of time. They’re essential for message distribution, quick feedback and networking, but for actual in-depth discussions and problem-solving, a VoIP phone service can assist in extending your reach allowing you to engage in a meaningful dialogue and potentially sell your product and/or services to your customer base in an effective way.

When 1+1=3

To experience the benefits of both social media and a VoIP system, they can be combined to work to your advantage, synergistically. For starters with the dedicated multiple toll-free lines obtained from a VoIP phone system, you can assign various marketing campaigns to specific lines and promote in tweets and status updates. This will allow you track and document your case studies as to which initiatives were the most successful.

Think about how your social media involvement actually ‘brands’ your company. Do you provide relative links in your tweets and status updates that paints your business as authoritative in your niche? Links lead to relevant content and attracting new and repeat visitors starts feeding your selling funnel with prospects that can be followed up by emails and phone conversations.

On the support side of the equation, social networks will provide your customers with quick answers to FAQs and technical support. Then you can leverage your VoIP system to follow-up with webinars, call-back sessions, free advice and appointment scheduling. You can even set up specific times of the week or month where your team are available by VoIP to discuss product, services, support and updates.

Integration with Mobile Apps

With the proliferation of mobile apps and new technological devices, as stand-alone’s they are difficult to access. Integration with your VoIP system is a smart way to keep them all in one spot for optimal usage. Accessing the information gathered from these various apps will become an easier process, when filtered through one VoIP channel. You can also pull together your audio, video and email in a similar fashion, so all these extraneous components are consolidated.

HeavyReading.com Study

A recent study byHeavyReading.com on VoIP call centers, titled, ” “VoIP Call Centers Adapt to a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) World,” analyzed eight companies and how they effectively adapted social networking, mobile VoIP, and cloud technology into their service platforms. The study’s participants helped to uncover the benefits of social networking and VoIP systems.

In the report, it was found that VoIP call centers work exceedingly well with the financial and other vertical markets, where the consolidation of communication onto a single platform was found to be an effective way to conduct day-to-day business transactions. In fact many of these companies were actually using VoIP communications systems as revenue generators, in addition to customer service.

Being Active in One helps the Other

If you’re looking to convert customer engagement into sales, you need to be vigilant about keeping active on all your social networks. Signing up social network accounts is only the first step. From there, you need to engage proactively on all these social channels. After registering your business with Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr – be aggressive in carrying on two-way convos using VoIp — that will open the doors for more comprehensive dialogues.

Time-savings & Cost-efficiency

Since social media marketing and VoIP services are effective marketing tools that do not take a big bite out of your annual budgets, it is all the more reason to make them work for you. For instance, with a service like Telzio, small businesses can install and set-up their VoIP service in less than 5 minutes, and at a fraction of the cost of some of the other services in the marketplace today.

It also offers you the flexibility should you decide to grow your small business over time. As your company expands, you can dedicate additional phone lines for your employees or toll-free lines for specific marketing campaigns, and you can also take advantage of new functions and features as soon they roll-out, with minimal additional outlay.

At end of the day. . .

VoIP and social networking were bound to converge. While they both interface with data sharing in different ways, together, they provide a more robust approach to making your business more viable, relevant and financially sound. With companies looking to adopt integrated communications platforms that make use of VoIP and cloud-based services, it’s only makes sense that they add social networking to the marketing mix.