Social Media and Knowledge Management
In the information era, social media emerges as an effective tool for knowledge workers to collaborate and share knowledge. Timely access to relevant knowledge is key to delivering effective customer service. By embracing the challenges and opportunities of social media, organizations can gain an edge in providing seamless high quality customer service.
Social media use is evolving rapidly and it is changing the landscape of customer service at an ever increasing rate. Customers are expecting to engage with organisations through channels of their choice leaving customer service with the challenge to work through multiple channels, such as Web, Facebook and Twitter as well as traditional agent based channels. Pursuing an integrated strategy to multichannel customer service requires a solid foundation for the organization's knowledge base. So, the content managed within a knowledge management tool should be effectively optimized for delivery via multiple channels. With social media sharing features offered by PHPKB software, a knowledge base can be used effectively by a wider range of users across a wider range of situations.
There are a few important similarities between knowledge management and social media. We use them both to obtain and access new information with the use of technology. Moreover, both of them require individuals to provide new inputs and create new content intended for sharing. However, there is a crucial difference between them. Knowledge management is what your company, or what your superiors want you to know, based on what they deem is crucial for your work. Social media, on the other hand, is there to tell you what your users deem important, based on their own experiences with your products/services and you are there to ascertain, judge or agree with what they have to say.
The good thing about this is that you can put social media to good use if you combine it with your knowledge management system or knowledge base software.
Sharing Knowledge Across Social Media
Providing access to your knowledge base via established social media channels can be easily achieved with PHPKB knowledge base software. Knowledge sharing via social channels is a great way to get your smart, well-researched content in front of new people, proving your expertise and growing your audience. The benefit of knowledge sharing is that social media users will gain access to relevant knowledge from your organization using a social media platform of their choice.
Benefits of Social Media in Knowledge Management
Social media sharing is a big aim for many businesses looking to build their brand, extend their reach, and generally make the most of their online marketing efforts. There are millions of people using social media platforms. Your business can reach a large pool of people and opens the door for your business to find more leads that want your products or services.
Below are a few of the benefits of socially sharing your knowledge base documents:
High Quality Customer Service
Social media is changing the landscape of customer service at an ever increasing rate. Customers expect to engage with businesses through channels of their choice making customer service a challenge for organisations; serving customers through multiple channels, such as web, Facebook and Twitter, etc. By embracing the challenges and opportunities of social media and multichannel engagement, organisations can gain an edge in providing seamless high-quality customer service.
Timely access to relevant knowledge is the paramount factor in delivering effective customer service. Implementing a strategy to multichannel customer service requires a solid foundation for the organisations knowledge base. Therefore, PHPKB knowledge management tool allows you to share your knowledge documents with your users on multiple social platforms.
Being a huge conversation channel, the platform of social media gives an instant way to receive customers’ feedback. Moreover, interacting with them in real time builds confidence in your brand.
Brand Building
PHPKB knowledge management tool allows you to add social sharing buttons on knowledge base documents (articles, news) which not only ease you in sharing information but also let your visitors share your documents. As visitors share your content with their networks, and their networks follow suit, your content spreads across the internet, getting thousands or even millions of shares. This exposure is especially beneficial because all those shares, likes, and comments show an existing connection with your brand. This would help the new customers to see how existing customers are using and benefitting from your products.
Keep Users up to date
A knowledge base needs to be updated, the information offered needs to be recent, relevant and verified. Social media allows you to share these recent updates and keep your audience informed. This type of behavior is good for building trust and staying relevant.
Quick Notifications
Users check their social media accounts multiple times per day and when you share your knowledge on such platforms, it gives you the opportunity to notify your users about any updates, new releases or fixes. It is a great way to get readers as soon as you publish a new post.
Improves Search Engine Optimization
Social media profiles are a great way to connect to your prospects and customers and have the power to rank in the top 10 results. They work as a doorway to your business website because they show your human side. They not only inform the searcher about your business but also help them become a part of your conversations. PHPKB knowledge management software let you optimize your social profiles and keep them fresh with the facility of social sharing of your knowledge base contents.
How to enable social sharing in PHPKB?
You can easily enable the social sharing on your documents i.e. articles and news. Social buttons on news can be enabled by marking the "Enable Social Sharing?" setting available under "News Page" settings of "Feature Settings"
To enable it for knowledge base articles; go to "Article Settings" and scroll down to "Article Options" setting. Look for "Enable Social Sharing?" setting and check this option. This would start displaying the social sharing buttons in front end article screen as shown below.
Guidelines for Social Media Sharing
- Share on Audience Specific Channels: If your contents are more geared around professional readers and business, you might have more potential traffic from LinkedIn. However, if your target reader is more visual, it might make more sense to focus on Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram.
- Re-Post Content: Re-posting knowledge base documents allows you to get a full life out of your content. As you grow your knowledge base, you build up a great collection of articles, but they won’t all be hit right away. You can give these great articles new life by continuing to promote them on social media.
- Limit Sharing Buttons: Having too many buttons on your knowledge base documents will also confuse readers and slow down your page speed. By adding more buttons would rather abandon the sharing at all rather than sharing on every social network.
- Creating New Titles: Your customers always want something fresh from you, if you don't have somethinh fresh to share, change the titles of your articles and give them a fresh look.
As the popularity of social media continues to rise, ensure your knowledge management system provides the features to ensure content delivery to your users across the social media platforms of their choice. To find out more about our social media ready knowledge management software, please contact us.
