Ricoh SA moves into social media

"Social media offers ubiquitous communications tools that help us to engage our audiences and communicate important, relevant, and interesting information, while gauging their opinions, gaining their feedback and driving toward the way we will work in the future," says Dierdre Fernandes, marketing, events, CSR, PR and sponsorship co-ordinator at Ricoh SA.

It has selected these three channels for their ability to reach a wide audience and range of social media channel tastes and uses targeted content to ensure a clear direction for its community.

Content focuses on its services emphasis in vertical markets. Key verticals are healthcare, education, finance, logistics, legal, government and commercial printers. It also supports a number of CSR initiatives, such as The Love of Christ Ministries, which aids abandoned and orphaned babies, 17 Squadron, a South African Air Force squadron dedicated to humanitarian and peace support missions, the Ricoh Pumas wheelchair basketball team and more that will be highlighted through the ongoing social media campaign.

More reliant on technology

"Our messages offer access to useful information for our community, such as sponsored studies conducted by economist intelligence unit that demonstrates healthcare, pharmaceutical and biotech executives are becoming more reliant on technology. Another study that offers insightful views to our community shows that African and European business leaders are more concerned about losing their competitive edge than their global counterparts."

It has employed its South African marketing partners to assist with the development, rollout and maintenance of the campaign. These include advertising agency, Lesoba Difference, to develop its social media strategy in tandem with digital agency Karbon Black, which additionally performs digital fulfilment. Content for the campaign is derived from its PR content, developed by Scarlet Letter.

The company and its marketing partners monitor and manage the channels and report in to Ricoh Europe to ensure consistency across regions. It uses a number of metrics that include total posts, number of followers, number of replies, shares, re-tweets, clicks, saves, downloads, traffic, unique users, tabs viewed and more.

For more follow @Ricoh_SA on Twitter, go to the Facebook page or the company's LinkedIn profile.