Social networks can help businesses improve customer awareness and gather market intelligence in several ways: 1) Businesses can use blogs to regularly post content that educates customers and helps potential customers find the business. This builds relationships and spreads brand awareness. 2) Sites like Facebook and LinkedIn allow information sharing and advertising business pages to wider audiences. 3) Opinion sites like forums provide discussions for customers to find solutions and make purchase decisions with input from others. 4) Social media also helps businesses understand what customers want by analyzing content on blogs, LinkedIn profiles, and YouTube videos about competitors. This informs business strategy and positioning.

1. How an online business can use social network to improve
customer awareness of their business, and how social
network can help businesses gather market intelligence
about what customers want from their business?
An online business can use social network to improve customer awareness of
their business by using BlogSpot’s. BlogSpot’s can be used as posting regular articles
or others contents to a website which can be accessed and read by customers or free
for any users to gain more information. Most BlogSpot’s are interactive by allow visitors
to leave comments and opinion. The online business can build strong relationship with
customers. Blogging also provides another route for potential customers to find them if
they are not aware of their website.
Facebook and linked in is also a very good business network site where all over
the world population are connected together through this particular network. This allows
others to share information, articles and what going on in our mind plus reading
accessed throughout the world to been read and comments. Furthermore, business can
be also done through this network not only till socializing. We could create a special
business page to advertise our business that we are planning to work out.
Moreover social network there is also opinion drop out page such as lowyat,
google, yahoo and etc, where a person can open a discussion topic or search on
something that we are doubt of. This may ease our daily routine by reading and
understanding others given solutions and opinions rather than going through only the
knowledge from our side this leads to more accurate and better decisions on something
that we want to buy or problems that we need to solve.
There is no better way to get their branding out to a wider audience than to
sponsor an event. All those in the database of the event holders and any other sponsors
will then see their logo in all marketing materials distributed.
Social network can help businesses gather market intelligence about what
customers want from their business by using several social media such as blogs,
LinkenId, and YouTube. Blogs are an excellent source of continuous information on
industry issues, customers and competitors. LinkedIn is a very popular networking site
that has made it easier to identify sales leads as well as experts from all over the world.
These days, profiles from LinkedIn can be used to conduct network analysis, such as
how the employees for a competitor are linked to specialist research companies, new
business partners or even their best customers. LinkedIn communities can inform
competitors and be a hassle for employers themselves. As such, companies have
started to provide disclosure policies to employees on how they can participate in social
media and how to comment on professionally related issues.

2. We also can see how companies can pull out material from YouTube in order to
increase the knowledge of the competition. For example, one automotive company
features competitor commercials taken from YouTube as the opening screen of their
intelligence portal. This is to help their staff see what their customers watch in different
markets, and encourage them to think about how they can position their brands.
As a conclusion, I can say that social network bring more benefits to the seller
because compelling and relevant content will grab the attention of potential customers
and increase brand visibility, it can be much cheaper than traditional advertising and
increased loyalty and advocacy from the customers they've connected with.