Marketers and researchers are truly beginning to redefine what social media means to a business. But not all companies are growing at the same rate.
Last year, our social intelligence maturity assessment aimed to help companies analyze their social media programs, and present tailored ways they could expand to get more value from their social listening investment.
After getting responses from hundreds of companies of all sizes and industries, one thing became obvious—social media strategy is extremely diverse.
One company might have social listening embedded in its customer intelligence team, using social data to power its consumer insights.
Another company uses social data as an integral data source for their supply chain analyses.
And of course, many companies limit their social listening to simply monitoring and benchmarking their social media pages.
These differences begged further questions. What makes a company sophisticated compared to other companies? Which social listening use cases are most important in different industries? And which companies are getting the most value from social?
In our newest report, Benchmarking Social Intelligence, we dove into these responses to answer these questions.
Here are three takeaways that I found the most surprising.
1. It starts with your strategy
For this report, there were a few different ways a company could demonstrate social intelligence maturity, such as a social listening team regularly analyzing social data against sales, or the number of business units using social listening insights.
However the most important predictor of how much value a company gets out of their social listening investment wasn’t necessarily the deliverables that came out of the program.
It was how well the company had invested in a sophisticated social strategy. Is your C-suite invested in the success of your program? Are you using social listening for consumer research and business intelligence, or is it limited to just checking your Twitter account?
And this makes sense: you can’t consistently get tangible business results without a good strategy.
2. Small companies are more likely to have executives involved in social intelligence
Since we found that larger companies had more sophisticated social programs as a whole, we expected to see that as companies got bigger, their social programs received more executive buy-in than smaller companies.
And, a big part of growing a program and embedding social intelligence across an organization is getting the executives involved and knowledgable of the value of social media and social insights.
Turns out, the relationship between size of a company and executive involvement is not so straightforward.
Companies with less than 100 employees were the most likely to see their executives involved in or influenced by social intelligence.
3. The most advanced sector overall was the food & beverage industry
Of all the companies who filled out our assessment, on average companies in food and beverage were the most advanced.
I would have expected that the technology industry would have had an advantage in terms of analytics and social intelligence, so I did not expect to see them placed where they were (read the report to find out where 😏).
We analyzed our responses across several different factors, to identify exactly how different industries and different-sized companies approach social intelligence. Definitely check out the report and see how you compare to companies like yours.
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