Customer Experience

By Nick Johnson - May 6th, 2013

n this week's review of the week's big corporate social media stories, we look at Selling, Facebook, Social Listening and much more!

Are you socially devoted?

The latest stats from Social Bakers for Q1 2013 have been recently. The company has been running its ‘Socially Devoted’ programme with the latest figures offering an insight into how brands are now managing their social media communications.

What is clear from this research is that consumers continue to use social media as a means of communicating with brands. Those corporations that not only listen, but also respond to the questions they are asked are the winners in their sector. It seems that brands are learning from the mistakes of the past with 60% of questions on Facebook being responded to. However, the volume of questions being asked has increased by a massive 30% placing even more pressure on brands to increase their levels of communication.

The state of Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg recently delivered his state of the company address and revealed that the demise of Facebook post IPO has clearly failed to materialise with first quarter profits up 38% to $1.46 billion. For brands that have been concerned of late that their customers were falling out of love with social media leviathan breathed a sigh of relief after seeing the report that daily active users total 665 million on average, with monthly active users coming it at just over 1 billion. And if your company has been looking hard at mobile, 30% of Facebook’s income is now from mobile ads.

Social transforms selling

New research from Hearsay Social offers yet evidence that social media is now the leading retail channel. The key findings of the research include:

• Social selling requires collaboration from marketing. Successful social selling needs to be differentiated from, but collaborate with, marketing’s social efforts.
• Sales professionals use social differently throughout the customer life cycle. There is a place for social selling (and social marketing) in each phase of discover, explore, buy, and engage, but successful sales professionals must target their social efforts to the desires of the customer in their current stage of the customer life cycle.
• Sales professionals see business value in their social efforts, but are in the early stages of formally measuring ROI. Most sales professionals who have experimented with any form of social selling find that it helps them be more effective, however most organizations are still tracking success anecdotally, rather than with formal companywide metrics.
• Salespeople actively seek out new tools and technology to help them be more effective with social. Sales professionals see an opportunity for new technology to help them become more effective in social selling initiatives.

“The future of selling is social,” said Clara Shih, CEO and founder of Hearsay Social. “There is an enormous opportunity for sales leaders to help reps sell in the new way that customers want to buy, drive sales productivity through the roof, and help organizations stay relevant and competitive in the social era. Hearsay Social is excited to offer the only platform focused on social sales success for the enterprise.”

Until next time….

The Useful Social Media team.