The emergence of a powerful new communication platform that eraches well over 300 millions consumers is nothing short of remarkable.  These new platforms are the playground for the young and connected, but the user profile of most social networks is older than you might think, and its climbing quickly.

Regardless of whether you have one or million friends, followers, or fans there are multiple wyas your business could benefit from a more proactive social media strategy.  Take a quick inventory of how you are leveraging social media today:

1. Public Relations: Social media platforms presend completely new opportunity to instantly deliver message to millions of people.  The impact on public relations is simply ground shaking.
2. Customer Support: Where traditionally customer support has been viewed as a cost center, smart brands are stating to use socila networks to help offload their support costs on to a community of super users.
3.  Market Research: Having success to tens of millions of consumers who are openly talking about their reational and emotional needs is a newly discovered goldmine for market research.
4. Brand Marekting: Marketers should take notice if what they didn’t do; drown their fans in an over-caffeinated flood of chest pounding information about their products.
5. Promotions: Some of the most successful promotions have employed the power of the network itself to create fan base that didn’t exist prior to the promotion.
6. Consumer Education: Brands should be leverageing the interactive capabilities within social platforms to educate and motivate their consumers, “ask the expert” buttons, threaded discussions, and other media tools like video, images, and referce quotes.
7. Sales: This newly born ability to sell is stating to catch on and more and  more retailers are beginning to reap the benefits of enhancing their curb appeal inside the social shopping mall.
8. New Product Development: Some companies have started to leverage a public pool of collective brainpower to help their business identify innovative new market opportunities, and even assist with development of new product concepts.
9. Customer Relationship Management: While nobody can predict lifetime membership to the lates social sites, it seems that there is a chance that they could outlast consumer’s email and street address.

… yet to be discovered – the exciting part is that we have yet to uncover even half of the ways that these emerging applications and technologies will impact both consumers and corporate life.

Source: north social