Pavan Uppal - 13B

D1 - Evaluate the business use of social media to interact with customers and
promote products or services to a target audience.

Business: Heston Fish Bar

Introduction:
In this assignment, I will be evaluating how Heston Fish Bar uses Social Media to in-
teract with their customers and how they promote their products. It will include how
Social Media can be used to interact with customers, and how social media can pro-
mote their products or services. This will allow Heston Fish Bar to overcome its Social
Media difficulties.

Client/Business Requirements:
When I read the brief, I understood your needs to be that you are a new company
with a location in Heston. I also understood from the brief that you want to draw new
customers to your Fish Bar in Heston. When I read the brief, I also noticed that you
wanted to start promoting for kids' parties. I also gather from the summary that you
offer a variety of goods in various flavours. I observe that similar companies use a va-
riety of social media, and I recognise that you want to start using social media to mar-
ket your firm. You don't currently have any social networking accounts open.

Reading the brief also made it clear to me that you provide free WiFi for your clients. I
also understand that Heston Fish Bar employs six people on staff. When I look at
other companies, I see that they all have similar target markets, and your fish shop is
aimed at people who enjoy fish and chips.

You may compete with a similar company I found that is also a fish store. This other
fish shop, which goes by the name of Harry's Local Fish & Chips, might be the one
with which you are in competition. I choose this other company because it is a rival
that you and I can learn from.

I gathered from reading your general requirements that you want to set up social me-
dia even though you don't currently have any. I'll assist you in making a social media
strategy and choosing which social media to use.

Communication with your clients is one of the other responsibilities of the business.
It's critical that you think about your customers since using social media to promote
your company and connect with future customers—in this example, connecting with
current customers and letting them know about your shop—is essential.

Instead of using conventional approaches, social media websites enable you to con-
nect with a larger audience. Although posters would reach out to people who passed
Heston Fish Bar, using various social media websites will have a bigger impact on the
business as social media can reach out to more people then using posters and leaflets.
The use of traditional methods, such as posters, may not reach as many people.

Benefits of Social Media for Heston Fish Bar:

Heston Fish Bar is for all ages and everybody who has the products enjoy it, as the
food is of good quality, easy to eat and enjoyable, making a lot of people buy the
products. Heston Fish Bar is located on Heston Road, which is located right next to a
school, library and leisure centre, meaning that a lot of people walk past the shop and
potentially buy something, meaning the shop is popular and generates a good amount
of income annually. The shop generates good revenue as it is placed in a very popular
area, where there is a lot of foot traffic at different times of the day. Social Media can
increase its customer base as it will attract more people, specifically people that do
not live in the local area. Such as people posting positive reviews online, on the re-
view section of the Heston Fish Bar website, people sharing the food they liked with
friends and family, or on Instagram/Twitter. This will allow a greater income to be
generated and a more diverse audience to be gained by Heston Fish Bar, as there is
increased popularity in real life and on Social Media, such as increased web traffic.

Using social media can humanise the brand, meaning the ability to create real human
connections is one of the best things that social media candy for the business. Use so-
cial media to show new customers how much current customers already benefit from
your food. Authenticity builds trust. Trust, in turn, builds marketing receptiveness and
drives new business.

Potential buyers can easily and without much commitment express interest in your
company and your items through social media. Since generating leads is such a cru-
cial benefit of social media for businesses, several social networks offer ad types made
expressly for doing so. McCarthy and Stone, as an illustration, used Facebook lead ads
to enable people interested in learning more about their real estate projects to do so
with just a few taps.

Risks of Social Media for Heston Fish Bar:

However, Social Media can also have a downside, if a customer did not like the food
they had or if there was something wrong with it, such as it was undercooked or the
food had mould on it, then they can post a negative review online or can complain to
the shop that the food they were given was not up to their standards. Heston fish bar
can fix this by asking what product the customer ordered and making sure they get
rid of the same products that were bad, and can also provide the customer with a full
refund and offer them some vouchers or a discount the next time they come to the
shop. This will potentially mean that the customer will delete the review as they have
been treated nicely, and the shop has realised their mistake and tried to fix it to the
best of its abilities. But, mistakes are permanent meaning that this little mistake can
cause fewer people to buy from Heston Fish Bar.

On the flip side of having outdated social media profiles, some organisations make the
error of spamming their followers with an excessive number of pointless or repetitive
updates. Here, the best piece of advise is to avoid confusing quantity and quality.
You're not necessarily posting well just because you post frequently. Instead than
pleading for viewers' attention and involvement on social media, messages should en-
tertain and educate readers. Limit your content to what your customers want to see.
Finding out how frequently influential people in your field post on social media is an
excellent place to start.

The last thing you need is a hacker jeopardising the integrity of your good or service
when your company's brand is already under constant internet inspection. The slight-
est error in how you use social media might make your clients distrust you. The threat
posed by online hackers has claimed the lives of large corporations. For instance,
Burger King's Twitter account was hacked in 2013; before they regained control, of-
fensive posts had been seen by more than 80,000 followers. Despite the very real
threat posed by these security lapses, businesses can protect themselves from online
intrusions by updating their passwords and setting up a central administration system
with built-in firewalls for their social media pages. To identify security gaps and deter
unauthorised intrusions, businesses should also think about doing social media risk
assessments.
Interacting With Customers:
On the one hand, Heston Fish Bar beginning to use social media sites such as Twitter
and YouTube can be a great success on their part as a company. By using social me-
dia, it can make it a lot easier for Heston Fish Bar to interact with its customers daily,
whether it be by answering queries or advertising products or services to their cus-
tomers.

One way Heston Fish Bar can use social media is by interacting with their customers
by setting retweet goals to give customers a discount on a certain product, this can be
done recently and can have a huge success, gaining likes and retweets on Twitter, this
can show how invested the community is with Heston Fish Bar through the use of so-
cial media.

On the other hand, however, there are times when Heston Fish Bar’s interaction with
its customers can be limited. For example, if the Twitter account does not allow them
to ask questions about future products or services.

A quick improvement or answer to this is to hire more staff to run the Twitter ac-
counts, this would improve the ability of Heston Fish Bar to be able to interact with
their customers more, and therefore; improve the relations between Heston Fish Bar
and their customers.

Security Issues:
When using social media, you can be prone to a number of different security issues;
they can range from malware attacks to things like in-app phishing. Here is what
some of them are and how you can protect yourselves from them.

• DoS attack - This is a denial-of-service attack, where people will try to send thou-
sands of fake requests, and when doing this intend to try and crash your servers/
network and making your network inaccessible to others users. This would mean
that your social media accounts cannot determine which request is a legitimate re-
quest and this means you can be lead into blackmail or ransom. You can protect
yourselves from this by using multi-level protection services and VPNs. Some pro-
tection services can include things like anti-spam and content filtering. This will limit
the amount of bogus requests, allowing your services to handle all your requests,
and determining whether they are legitimate or not.

• Company-sensitive and personal information - People who work for Heston Fish Bar
could accidentally leak company-sensitive and personal information. The information
can also be attained by hackers who would trick the staff into giving away the infor-
mation by messaging the Heston Fish Bar social media account and pretending to be
somebody there not and acting in an innocent matter. To protect yourselves from
these attacks, the staff need to be fully trained in terms of how to use social media
and how to determine if somebody is someone who they say they aren’t.

• Malware - Cyber criminals try to trick the staff into clicking malicious links so that
they can download a some sort of malware. One way they could do this is by send-
ing messages to the social media account and pretend to be a legitimate account
that is sending a link that could help their business, however the link is a malicious
link which, one pressed, will download malware onto whatever device is being used.
Alternatively, cyber criminals can also trick the staff into giving the hackers the ac-
 counts login credentials. You need to make sure that the staff is trained on how to
determine the links or cyber criminals, na dot also make sure that they are extra
careful when engaging with customers. And to make sure that their anti-virus soft-
ware is up-to-date to make sure it can protect agains they nest viruses and mal-
ware.

Conclusion:

Overall, the way Heston Fish Bar can use social media to promote their products as
well as interact with their customers is mostly seen in a positive aspect. The success
in doing this can be seen in how popular the company can be in the future due to its
increasing popularity through social media. It has also can be seen through how suc-
cessful their social media accounts on both Twitter and YouTube can be.

When comparing the positives to the negatives; the positives easily outweigh the neg-
atives. However, this doesn’t mean that the negative aspects of Heston Fish Bar’s
social media are null, as support regarding Heston Fish Bar hasn’t always been of high
quality. A possible small amount of Twitter employees has led to customer support not
always being given; having gotten to the point where the Heston Fish Bar Twitter ac-
count has had to state that they do not answer support queries. Although these as-
pects are in terms of how many times they’ve happened, the comments that cus-
tomers have left will stay there permanently, showing how Heston Fish Bar may have
failed to deal with a situation. To improve this, I would suggest having more employ-
ees maintain Heston Fish Bar’s Twitter account to avoid being overwhelmed with
queries.

Apart from this, Heston Fish Bar on a whole has done well with its online services to
customers, they’ve shown great interest in interacting with its customers through
Twitter polls and asking questions to their customers. Therefore, I think that busi-
nesses and companies should make an effort to move to social media to promote and
interact with customers, as on a whole it can be seen as a positive as from using so-
cial media, it’s possible to gain more attraction and popularity, as seen with Heston
Fish Bar.

To conclude, I think that the main reasons why Heston Fish Bar are a success are be-
cause when they have issues and when a product isn’t up to scratch, Heston Fish Bar
deal with that professionally to make sure that the customer is happy and got the re-
sult they wanted. As well as this, I also believe they are successful because when a
customer enjoys a product, they explain how they feel about it, for example, on Twit-
ter, there are a lot of posts explaining why people should try these fish and chips,
saveloys or pukka pies etc. In addition to this, when they promote a product and it
has been a success they have offers on that specific food. For example, when they
surveyed to see what sausage was the most popular, the favourite was the battered
sausage and therefore the following week they had offers on it like 2 for £3. However,
sometimes when they promote a product it may get a completely different reaction
and not be as successful or may even hurt the image of Heston Fish Bar this is a neg-
ative aspect of why promoting some things can be negative on Heston Fish Bar.