I’m sure most people now know of the different types of social media being used today online from Facebook to Twitter. Its reach is stretching further and becoming more commonplace than just teenagers staying connected with each other. Businesses are now using social media to expand their customer base, provide perks and information to their existing customers and overall develop more of a relationship using these means.

I think the more ‘channels’ businesses can provide to their customers the better, especially when it comes to customer service. I’m going to use a recent situation I experienced with my cable company as an example of how social media could be proactive and handle the issues.

Our cable TV service went out one afternoon and stayed out for hours. I attempted to call the company to get service and the phone just rang and rang. I then decided to go to their website to contact support and the site would not come up. Eventually their site did load up after several minutes but no information on the situation and worked way to slow to actually use it. So now what? I ended up doing a search on twitter and google and eventually found some posts from a blogger at the local newspaper who had a full account on the issue. Apparently there was a system wide outage that affected a large number of customers so everyone was trying to call/visit their website for more information which brought the cable company’s customer service department to a halt. The only information I received at that point was using Twitter to follow the updates of this writer and other customers writing in to explain their situations.

Why didn’t the cable company have other means to explain the situation? Will they now have new plans in place? Imagine the same scenario but now the cable company uses Twitter and/or Facebook to write a simple post to explain the situation. Nice little snippets of information that could alleviate a phone call or email request. These social media sites are also hosted elsewhere so you don’t have to worry about it crashing your own server as customers scramble to get information on the situation.

The possibilities are endless out there for businesses to use social media in different ways to keep their customers happy. Content is king on the web and giving your clients the means to get that content is what is ultimately crucial to keep everyone happy. There is the debate in social media that most people don’t care what it is that you are wearing or eating, etc. but I’m sure they would want to know when you are releasing that new product or have an important issue to send out to your customers quickly and easily.