Consumer-Centric Strategic Social Media Plan for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

Abstract

Social media is changing consumer behavior and workplace expectations. The important role of social media is to quickly discover trends, extract structured insights to the marketplace and quantify perceptions of an organization’s products and services. Information about an organization’s products and services are easily accessed via social networks, blogs, tweets, videos, pictures, and numerous other online tools. When customers perceive that the information is positive, the organization can benefit with new and repeat sales. If, however, the information is negative, and the organization does not respond, the organization can suffer. In this paper, the authors define social media; discuss why it’s important to develop a social media plan that is embedded in the strategic fiber of the organization; as well as present how organizations are able to develop a customer-centric strategic social media plan and the impact of this plan on small and medium enterprises.