Surfing the web and browsing your social media feed has earned a reputation for wasting time and costing employers money. There is another side to social media, and when used correctly, the use of social media accounts can actually increase productivity, instead of draining it. Whether you engage employees on public sites such as Facebook or Twitter, or if you are using an internal social media system, you should make use of the new ways that social media accounts can change the way we work and do business.

Communicating with Your Customers

Everyone these days is on social media, and in touch throughout their entire day. The growth of technology and social media in general has eliminated the traditional 8–5 workday, and the ability to engage your customers. Posting after-hours or on the weekends can reach your customers when they are more available to absorb and respond to your posts. It also creates a way for customers to instantly ask questions and voice concerns, and to pass along your info to their friends and family, potentially increasing your customer base without paid advertising.

Collaboration within your Organization

Aside from the potential sales and service benefits, social media can actually help your people come together and work as a team. Allowing employees to engage with the organization, and to take pride in sharing and promoting the company they work for can have huge impacts. Keeping people informed and in the loop can make them feel valued, and break down barriers to communication that might otherwise exist within your company hierarchy. There are now social media platforms and project management tools that are designed to help you work in these collaborative environments. Check out Trello and Asana to get an idea of how these can help.

Quick Responses to Questions

One of the greatest benefits to social media in the workplace is the almost instantaneous ability to have questions answered. If an employee is stumped, or needs information from another department, putting it up on a social media site is fantastic. Any employee on the account can potentially see it, and it doesn’t have to be during working hours. This can save time by reducing the hours that one might sit back waiting for an answer to move forward with a problem.

Problem Solving

More people working to find a solution to a problem is almost always going to get you a better solution, faster. Putting a problem up on the social media site and asking for input from other employees may yield more possible solutions, and creating a broad discussion can help employees build on each other’s ideas. You never know who might have the best solution lurking in their brain, and whether or not you would have sought that person out for help if it weren’t for social media. Not only does this expand your reach to all the employees, it can help you identify creative thinkers and see who is truly invested in your organization.

Rapid Feedback

Part of the beauty of this new era of technology and social media is the speed at which things can occur. With real-time communication occurring, and with the ability to open up a conversation to 50 people instead of 5, you’re allowing people the opportunity to be heard. Whether it’s a customer, an employee, or a partner organization, social media gives a voice to people that you might not hear otherwise. Customer satisfaction and employee retention can be managed and monitored by a someone dedicated to making sure that problems are brought to your attention quickly, so that you can address and resolve them before any real damage is done. Nipping a problem in the bud before it begins siphoning cash from your budget is one of the most under-valued parts of the social media experience for businesses.

Social media can help you stop wasting time while waiting for responses, sending out communications, and can increase your ability to reach individuals inside and outside of your organizations. Almost all of these productivity-boosting ideas can come back to two main benefits; speed and quantity. Increasing the rate at which you do business while reaching vastly higher numbers of people is going to have a positive impact on your productivity.

Jessica Gust is a Marketing Assistant at Localpeek.co.uk- a new postcode finder. She is passionate about new marketing strategies, she is always eager to share her ideas through blogging.

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