IT Departments Can Help Marketers Make The Most Of Social Media

The process of successfully integrating social media into marketing strategies is traditionally assigned to agencies that use their own techniques to make such platforms generate real returns to businesses. But there can also be an important role played by the IT department, Kane Fulton writes for the Information Age website.

IT specialists are valuable for their abilities to make marketing strategies happen by offering data integration, management and governance expertise. They can also assist marketers in getting maximum value from social media, which in turn contributes to business growth.

Nowadays, brands have a great opportunity to spread the word about their brand through social channels by embarking on a broad suite of tactics such as advertising, creating branded pages in Facebook or accounts in Twitter and providing sponsored content. Becoming part of the social media landscape also helps companies to get a feel of consumers’ sentiment towards their products or competitors.

Most marketers, however, are not likely to turn to the IT department to use its skills to achieve particular targets, as they fear that engaging them will result in taking more time and drifting away from the core objective. Yet when a company needs to get a hint of consumers’ buying habits, they need IT’s data integration expertise to combine information generated from social media channels with data residing in other sources.

Besides, IT can also contribute to marketers’ setting standards across the company in terms of data, tools and technology to replace a fragmented approach to sourcing products and services, which endangers businesses’ capacity to generate value from social channels and impose the necessary control.