I remember when I was a Freshman in college back in 2005 and a friend of mine asked me to connect with him on Facebook. Without having a clue what he was talking about, what I was getting myself into, or what was about to unfold, I agreed.

Today, Facebook has signed up more than 900 million customers since 2004, and on average, has 526 million customers logging in each day. Twitter and LinkedIn have seen a similar growth trajectory. Within the last month, Twitter averaged 460,000 new accounts per day, and professionals were signing up to join LinkedIn at a rate of approximately two new members per second. All three companies enable their customers to create and join vast global networks, and to share and communicate information in real time, making the world more open and connected.

Whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or a growing professional, social media should be on your radar. Social media has the potential to help your company identify what your customers are saying about your products or services and enable you to build your own personal brand as a working professional (which I’ll discuss in my next blog).

What Do Your Customers Think?

With just a few clicks and 140 characters, a social media advocate can post a message to his or her Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn network and impact your business. According to Facebook, its users generated an average of 3.2 billion “Likes” and “Comments” per day during the first quarter of 2012. Twitter similarly reported an average of 140 million “Tweets” per day in last month. But what do all of these “Likes” and “Tweets” mean for a business?

Marketing     

• What are customers saying about your products and services? Is it good or bad?
• Improve your messaging strategy based on real-time feedback of what customers are saying.
• Trump the competition by understanding their customers’ needs and improving your product offerings.

Sales    

• Are there signs of interest in particular products or services that your industry hasn’t been able to fulfill?
• Listening to what customers want can lead to your next innovative product or big deal.

Customer Service    

• Manage customer complaints and improve communication channels to disgruntled customers.
• Ensure customers that you are listening to their challenges and needs.
• Engage with your customers to encourage loyalty

Salesforce & Radian6 have recognized the need to leverage the vast amount of information shared through social media. For example, Radian6 has developed and invested in complex algorithms to help organizations of any kind analyze and properly react to the information on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. And according to TechCrunch, Twitter is leveraging the power of its community by partnering with Radian6 to provide the social media monitoring service with complete access to all public tweets. This isn’t the first time Twitter and Radian6 have worked directly together, either.

At a high level, Radian6 can recognize how many people are talking about certain products and whether comments are posting positive or negative. Executives can collect and analyze the data points provided by Radian6 to understand what impact the comments are having on the company’s brand, and use that insight to make better business decisions.

Take the airline industry for example. As a consultant who spends a lot of time 35,000 feet in the air, I highly value quality customer service during weather delays and flight disruptions. With the power of Radian6, airline industries are able to listen closely to the voices of their customers during these stressful times and create an improved level of customer engagement. Eric Berridge’s recent blog post makes you wonder: think of the how United Airlines could have increased customer loyalty and engagement if it had been listening to its customers more closely.