Be a Leader in the Social Media World with Lithium

92% internet users in the US are using one of the social networking sites other than Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and LinkedIn. As per the Global Digital Statistics 2014, your online users are exploring new social channels to connect with each other, than just relying on the traditional ones. This means that you also need a dedicated social portal on your website for your prospects and customers.
If you already have a social community on your website, you are on the right track.

But, if not, then you need to start thinking about how to convert your website into a social hub. To get started, consider Lithium.

Lithium is a single integrated social media platform to connect with your customers, prospects and new users. With Lithium -, you can build vibrant customer communities to engage your potential customers driving sales and ROI. You can grow brand advocacy, build trust, reduce service cost and increase customer satisfaction using Lithium communities, just like Skype, AT&T, Best Buy, Telstra, Barclaycard, Sky, Future Shop and many more.

Why Skype, AT&T, Best Buy & Telstra love Lithium?

Companies find the Lithium community platform to be marketer-friendly and intuitive. Some of it’s key features include:

• User-friendly admin console
• Custom Development
• Integration with Salesforce.com and other CRM systems
• Social media management integration
• Advanced search engine optimization tool (SEO)
• Lithium social intelligence analytics software
• Seamless monthly upgrades

Lithium offers various out-of-the-box features for building a functional and engaging community. Some of these include:

• Discussion Forums

  Discussion forums allow you to connect with potential customers and product experts for peer-to-peer discussions. Engage your users with discussions related to your product, services, and new activities in your company or industry, within the community. These forums encourage your employees as well as subject-matter experts to help other users in the community. Posts within your community also help you in achieving a better visibility in search engines.
  Skype, a leading internet voice calling reduced their support costs with discussion forums. Skype’s peer-to-peer community improved its 1st contact resolution to 70% and reduced support cost by 10%.

• Crowdsourced Ideas

  You would fall in love with the ideas that you can collect from your customers, users and partners. With Crowdsourced Ideas feature in Lithium, you can collect, categorize, tag, and filter the most popular ideas and get them implemented. When any new idea is posted on your community, you can keep updating the status to keep your users informed. Leveraging ideas, National Instruments was able to collect a long list of idea product improvement.
  By this approach, Verizon’s community contributed 1700 customer ideas in one year and is responsible for 85% of the features in a product release.

• Tribal Knowledge Base

  Managing Knowledge resources is something your users would love to do. Lithium Tribal Knowledge Base allows your customers, users, and employees to produce and share content. With this, you can quickly capture the content, re-purpose it and promote it. Moreover, you don’t have to start from scratch when creating a knowledge resource. You can simply pick existing content from the community, enrich and update it, and finally publish it.
  Take a cue from Lenovo’s education team, who has created a knowledgebase using the 1200+ content articles contributed by their super fans.

• Q&A

  Your customers ask a question on your community and within minutes, they get multiple answers from other users. With Q/A feature in your community, you can promote peer-to-peer assistance, and reduce first-level support tickets for your customer service team. Not just your customer find the relevant answers, but Q/A also accelerates purchase decisions for your users and improves customers satisfaction score.
  BSkyB, a leading British telecom and ISP company, enabled its community users to post direct questions. This feat helped them achieve 82,000 customer interactions per month and increase their C-SAT score by 87%.

• Blogs

  If you want to drive traffic on your website by publishing articles, you can easily do this by using Lithium’s blogging platform. Your users can contribute to your blog by creating and publishing compelling articles using a single user process profile within the community.
  Virgin Atlantic launched a blog using Lithium, to create a central hub for their customers, ultimately leading to an increase in sales. 40% of their new acquisitions were referred from the blog leading to 12% uplift in organic search traffic in the first 6 months.

• Reviews

  With this feature, you can capture the reviews from your potential customers to increase the buyer’s confidence about your product, ultimately leading to an increase in the conversion rate. By using, Lithium’s reputation engine, you can motivate your fans and reward them when they review your products.

• Photos and Videos

  Visually appealing communities drive more traffic. Use this feature, to give a control to your customers to add photos/videos to their galleries and in their posts. Your users can also review and approve the videos before they get live on the community.

• Contests

  If you want to drive engagement to your communities, you can do that by using this exclusive feature to create video, photo or story contests right from your online community. By promoting your contests from your website, you can drive website traffic. You can centre your contests around your product to elevate your brand reputation.

• Groups

  If you and your users want to create groups sharing the same social interests, this can be easily done within Lithium. Your users can automatically subscribe to the conversations that matter and get notifications, which keep the discussions fresh and lively.

• Facebook & Twitter

  You can use social media integration to connect your social networks with your online communities. By using Lithium Social Web, you can reduce your support cost by providing multi-channel support to your Facebook fans/Twitter followers. Lithium social media integration also helps you to surface the Q/A boards or discussion forums to your Facebook account. In addition to this, you can pull tweets into your discussions for seamless conversation on your community.

• Badges

  In Lithium communities, you can add gamification to drive online community engagement. Use gaming mechanics like badges, ranks to reward your users and attract new users to your community. Convert your online community into a fun zone by acknowledging your users with rewards. This in turn increases engagement on your community.

Conclusion

Therefore, Lithium is an integrated social media platform that helps you to deliver a seamless customer experience across all your digital points. Being a SaaS deployment, there is no need for you to buy its hardware and to worry about its upgrades, as it offers monthly feature updates. With Lithium, you can synchronize your social media profiles and conversations with your marketing automation, email, events, CRM, and loyalty system.
So, what are you waiting for? Keep pace with the social media world with Lithium online communities.

About Grazitti^™ Lithium Community Services

References:

1. http://www.lithium.com/why-lithium/customer-success/
2. http://www.lithium.com/products-solutions/online-communities/
   http://www.slideshare.net/etsarkov/global-digital-statistics-2014-29876928