Tweak your business with social media

In recent years social media spread their wings to the every field of life. We are now addicted to social media and micro bogging sites. Last year social media did not have as much impact on SEO as expected by experts. If you have seen in recent years social media gains unexpected popularity over other sites. In my opinion in 2012 social media will leave a remarkable foot prints in terms of SEO. Social media is going to have even more impact on search.


Social media is now become a trend among people of different kind of background and is more popular among teenagers. Social media is adapted by almost every kind business, small or big. Organizations show a huge interest over social media and micro blogging sites.


Impact of social media on your business


Presence on social media is very important for organizations in terms of business and availability.

Social media is a very good way to connect your target audience or customers. It helps organizations in terms of customer opinions and reviews. Social media is a very good platform to get product reviews and brand popularity. It also helps organizations to gain popularity. Social media is key for service industries to gain customer base and popularity.


For small businesses, and particularly solo operations, this means that online marketing could potentially take even more time. Just imagine it, if Google suddenly starts delivering results that are clearly influenced by social media, all the SEOs will be jumping in that direction more than ever. Small businesses could find themselves feeling forced to spend even more time on social media.


Few facts about social media

1. B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads per month than those who do not. Source: Hubspot, State of Inbound Marketing Lead Generation Report, 2010
2. 69% of B2B marketers are shifting their budgets toward social media. Source: MarketingSherpa, October 2010
3. 41% of B2B companies are acquiring customers through Facebook. Source: Hubspot, State of Inbound Marketing Report, 2011
4. 86% of B2B companies are using social media, compared to 82% of B2C companies. Source: White Horse, March 2010
5. Social media helps B2B marketers improve search results. Source: BtoB Magazine, July 2010

       
How to use social media for business

Build a social media marketing team to optimize your marketing cost. When you are building your team, it is very important to choose right members in your team. Each member should passionate about your business and want to be involved in your social media marketing efforts.


Firstly appoint a social media manager to oversee the implementation of the social media marketing strategy.

Then appoint community engagers who become the online face of the company, interacting with and engaging with the online community.

And lastly appoint content creators to create the content that gets posted to social media sites.


Start monitoring to know what is said about you and what is said about your competitor. This will help you generate leads, keep you abreast of what is going on in the industry, identify your key influencers, discover your audience, discover who is producing and who is consuming content within your industry, and allow you to respond and engage with your audience in real time.


Establish your goals very closely for what reasons you are using social media. Collect data from there and choose the metrics you will monitor based on your goals for social media marketing. To define your audience you need to know what is your audience doing online and where does they hang out online. Choose a social media platform that make sense for your business and where your audience is. Design a good action plan for your target audience. Social media involvement needs to be targeted and consistent engagement with your audience. what type of content you will post, and how often you will post content should be pre planned. Collect the response data from there, analyze and tweak your action plan to increase your effectiveness. If some of your plans not working then simply change them.


Social media is creating a competitive advantage. It differentiate your brand by being part of your industry’s conversations and broadening your business centers of influence and make business sustainable. Connecting and following your industry’s leaders through social media is an alternative way to stay atop trends. This way you will always offer your customers and clients the latest.

Service Industries And Technology

Service industries are growing rapidly for last two decades and it forms a backbone for social and economical development of India.In India, services sector, as a whole, contributed as much as 68.6 per cent of the overall average growth in gross domestic product (GDP) between the years 2002-03 and 2006-07.

India ranks fifteenth in the services output and it provides employment to around 23% of the total workforce in the country. The various sectors under the Services Sector in India are construction, trade, hotels, transport, restaurant, communication and storage, social and personal services, community, insurance, financing, business services, and real estate.
The most important services in the Indian economy has been health and education.They are one of the largest and most challenging sectors and hold a key to the country's overall progress.

The Indian information technology (IT) industry has played a key role in putting India on the global map and is now envisioned to become a US$ 225 billion industry by 2020.

Over the past decade, the Indian IT-BPO sector has become the country’s premier growth engine, crossing significant milestones in terms of revenue growth, employment generation and value creation, in addition to becoming the global brand ambassador for India.

According to a research report published by National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), ‘IT-BPO Sector in India: Strategic Review 2011,’ the sector is estimated to aggregate revenues of US$ 88.1 billion in FY2011, with the IT software and services sector (excluding hardware) accounting for US$ 76.1 billion of revenues.

Now service industries are growing with growing technology. Technology completely changes the concept of service industries. Technology helps service industry in different ways to grow the industry. Technology reduces queues and waiting that was the biggest problem faced by public. Now services are available online that reduces industry cost as well as easily available to public.

Hotels and restaurants are valuable part of service industry that affects social and economical development of country. Rapid transformation in the lifestyle of Indians, particularly those living in urban India, has resulted in dramatic increase in the demand for processed food. The main reason why processed food is luring the urban Indians is the convenience.
The next time you go out for dinner to a fancy restaurant, take a look at the staff there. Well-groomed, polite and giving timely service, they may seem less in number, but every person has a distinctive job of his or her own.

There are lot of opportunities in restaurant and food industry in terms of technology. Food industry is relatively slow to adapt technology. But they will be technically rich within next 5 to 10 years due to increasing social and living standards of public.

There are few websites like tastykhana.com and justeat.in that offer online ordering, table booking and party management. Among those Tastykhana is a better service provider. Tastykhana is technically strong and they have strong delivery team. Other providers are deeply depend on restaurant delivery team while Tastykhana has it's own delivery team. Tastykhana has faster and well trained delivery team that delivers food up to 15 kilometer radius. Tastykhanaservices are now limited to pune only and will expand to all metro cities.

Tastykhana is unique due to its instant service. Once you order online you will receive a confirmation sms and food within given time frame.
Tastykhana has dedicated call centre for customers who placed order via phone/mobile @ 020 33006464. 

There are two ways to order food.
1. Log on to www.tastykhana.in and order online.
2. Call at 020 33006464 and place your order.

As technology grow, service industry will also grow.

Startups in restaurant industry

Service industry in India is growing very rapidly and have a great contribution to Indian economy. If you remember, 5 years back service industries like hotels and restaurants were technically very poor. There was a very little presence of hotels and restaurants in web world. There was minimal influence of technology in service industry.

       Now after 5 years service industry is very used to web world as well as technology. Technology have changed service industry in several ways. The way of working, customer service standard, promotions and facilities have changed rapidly. This enables a tough competition among them. In other word you can say the business is completely changed over the period.


       Now I would like to come to the point. In recent years I have seen several startups that directly do business with restaurants. Home delivery business is a thought of new generation entrepreneurs. They definitely find a gap between restaurants and customers. This gap gave birth to a new concept of homedelivery business. Major players in this field are Tastykhana, Zomato, justeat(hungrybangalore), food ka mood and a place to dine. All of them are startups not more than 4 years in business.


These companies work on different models of business. Among them two models are popular. One is 'Lead Model' and other is 'Delivery Model'.


Lead Model

This model is very favorable as company prospects. As this model requires very small team of 4 to 6 employees to run the operations smoothly. The basic function of this model is to take order from customer and give lead to restaurant. Restaurant prepares order and deliver it to customer. In lead model they charge 5-10% commission from restaurants per order. So revenue come from restaurants in form of order commission, set up fees(very nominal) and advertisements on portal. Zomato, justeat(hungrybangalore), food ka mood and a place to dine they all work on lead based model.


Pros:

1. Requires very small team to run the business.
2. Business process is very easy and cost saving.
3. Highly scalable business.       

Cons:

1. Business volume is very low.
2. Conversion rate is very low.
3. Not sure order will deliver to customer.       

Delivery Model

This model is very favorable for restaurants as well as customers. As they commit to delivery food to customer's door step. Basically they provide end to end solution to customers and restaurants. In this model company take order from customer, place order to restaurant and also deliver food to customers. This model requires lot of human resources like delivery boys, customer care executives, sales team, technical team and management team. In delivery model they charge 15 to 25% from restaurants per order and also a nominal delivery charges to customer. So revenue come from both hands in form of delivery charges, commission, setup fees and promotions. Tastykhana is the only major player who works on delivery model.


Pros:

1. Business volume is high.
2. Conversion rate is very high.
3. Reduces restaurant's headache as they deliver food.
4. Revenue come from restaurants as well as customers.
5. They are committed to deliver food at customer's door step.       

Cons:

1. Requires a big team to run the business.
2. Business process is little bit complicated.
3. It takes time to scale the business.

           

In coming days delivery model will be very popular as it provides end to end solution. This model will work as bridge between customers and restaurants.