Effective Communication through Social Media.

Effective communication is the capability or potential to convey information to others efficiently and conveniently. (Krauss, R. M., & Fussell, S. R. 2014). America Management Association (AMA) defines effective communication as a communication that entails two or more parties: the sender and the receiver, who undertake the exchange of information, which is evident to both parties. Due to the dynamics in many sectors today, the world has moved into a digital age whereby many people access networks and online platforms. Therefore, for an individual or organization to convey information effectively to a large number effortlessly, they will need to do so through social media platforms. Organizations have come up with information systems to help them communicate effectively with their customers.

Guidelines for effective communication through social media

Different organizations have created guidelines to ensure adequate information transfer from the company to the customers through social media. Employees in charge of various sectors need to understand these guidelines to make communication effective. These guidelines include.

Learn how different social media platforms work. Unlike social media, mediums work differently; some of these mediums require short official messages, while others can contain statements with more information. Therefore, employees should understand the medium they ought to use in conveying information. Some people access social media platforms more quickly than others.s.

Learn the norms and ethics in online communication. Employees should learn the use of polite language and create a professional language online. They should behave more courteously, just as they would in a face to face communication instances. Employees should avoid rude and unprofessional language.

Respond to feedback, suggestions, and complaints. Employees should reply to feedback when someone writes to them and respond to complaints and requests; this shows professional communication and leads to effective communication.

Use precise and understood language.  Employees should consider the use of language well understood by their customers.

As a company’s communication manager, I will advise the company CEO to implement the following guidelines to be followed by employees to realize effective communication through social media.  The policies will include:

Understand our targeted population. As a company, we should understand our target customers to make the effective communication. The customers, through segmentation, will be differentiated according to their shared social media platform. Segmentation by considering aspects like; age, gender, profession, and social class. (An, J., Kwak, H., Jung, S. G., Salminen, J., & Jansen, B. J. 2018).  Different customers prefer various social media platforms, and as a company, we should reach to them through these platforms.

Understand the different social media platforms. We should learn about the other platforms and understand the language, considering the customers in these platforms.

Encourage the use of professional language on social media. As a company, we should encourage professional language and avoid informal chats on social media platforms. These will help customers to locate or relocate important information quickly. Some media may require the use of well-crafted colloquial language, and the company can also realize this. In choosing a language to use in different platforms, we should understand who is on which platform and the preferences on language use. (DeVito, M. A., Birnholtz, J., & Hancock, J. T. 2017). The company should implement the use of clear and understood language to our customers should be implemented to avoid misunderstanding.

Provide feedback on customer complaints and recommendations. As a company, we should resolve to provide feedback to customers who reach us through social media. Keeping the dialogue will improve their confidence in our company and give us a platform for customer satisfaction analysis and wants analysis. Many companies have considered this as a way to gain new customers and maintain customers. We will encourage openness in our platforms to bring about dialogue with our customers to have their views on our products and any arising needs in the industry. (Macnamara, J., & Zerfass, A. 2012).

Improve the use of social media as a means of communication within the organization. As a company, we can resolve to use social media platforms to pass information within different organization departments to reduce time wastage incurred from moving from one department to another.

References

Macnamara, J., & Zerfass, A. (2012). Social media communication in organizations: The challenges of balancing openness, strategy, and management. International journal of strategic communication, 6(4), 287-308

Krauss, R. M., & Fussell, S. R. (2014). Mutual knowledge and communicative effectiveness. In Intellectual teamwork (pp. 125-160). Psychology Press.

An, J., Kwak, H., Jung, S. G., Salminen, J., & Jansen, B. J. (2018). Customer segmentation using online platforms: isolating behavioral and demographic segments for persona creation via aggregated user data. Social Network Analysis and Mining, 8(1), 1-19.

DeVito, M. A., Birnholtz, J., & Hancock, J. T. (2017, February). Platforms, people, and perception: Using affordances to understand self-presentation on social media. Proceedings of the 2017 ACM conference on computer-supported cooperative work and social computing (pp. 740-754).