Depending on whose statistics you select to believe, somewhere between eighty-seven and ninety-eight firms currently have a presence on social media sites. Whichever figure is additionally correct, it’s fairly clear that if your company doesn’t use a minimum of one in all Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, etc., it's in Associate in the Nursing's ever-decreasing minority.

Social media has modified the means businesses communicate with their customers, however, it's done very little to vary the means folks at intervals the business communicate with one another. nonetheless, this distinction is commonly lost amidst over-generalized definitions of “social business”. Consumer-focused social networks have a big half to play in trendy business communication, however, the strengths and we must have a tendency weaknesses of every sort of network is known if we are to use them effectively.

Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, and YouTube are primarily business-to-consumer and consumer-to-consumer networks. they provide vast client reach – with one billion active users on Facebook and three hundred million on Twitter, these networks are a good place to form contact with customers and prospects. however they’re not nice places to own meaningful conversations with customers, thus ought to typically be complemented by company-managed client communities.

Unfortunately, comparatively few firms use social media as a part of the Associate in Nursing's integrated social business strategy. Most companies’ Facebook and Twitter pages are fairly ancient selling operations that broadcast advertising messages with no real sign of true client engagement. and plenty of that do try engagement clearly struggle to make meaningful relationships at intervals the rather oversimplified scope of a consumer-focused network.

However, describing the most effective means for firms to use Facebook and Twitter isn't the aim of this series. Yes, they are doing have a very important role in business communication, however, they're not a full answer for client engagement. And if they're imperfect client engagement tools, they're even worse as employee-to-employee or business-to-business tools.

The idea of making personal Facebook cluster workers be appealing to debate work problems might at the start sound appealing – employees are most likely already on Facebook, and it'd provide the impression that management “get” social media. however Facebook is basically not designed for business communication – it provides very little ability to reason or seek data, and fairly poor knowledge management capabilities. As a result, it's of very little use for “real work” and is barely appropriate for workplace chatter and minutiae, delivering little or no business worth. we are going to come back to the present purpose within the next article once we contemplate enterprise social networks.

We need to recognize that there are 3 distinct forms of social networks, Associate in Nursingd an integrated social business strategy uses all 3 to boost communications with totally different teams of individuals.

3 types of network 

  1. Public social networks like Facebook and Twitter – sensible for creating contact with customers and prospects
  2. Social extranets together with client communities, for deeper communication and collaboration with customers, and personal business-to-business networks for communication with partners and B2B customers.
  3. Employee networks for internal company communication

Of the distinguished public social networks, maybe the toughest to reason is LinkedIn. it's typically delineated as a business-to-business network, however, it extremely isn’t; LinkedIn doesn’t describe itself in and of itself. it's a network of execs United Nations agency work for businesses, however, maybe a person-to-person network instead of business-to-business. Cynics may describe it as simply an achievement website or authorized address book, and an outsized share of the claimed 225 million active users do use it like that. however there are clear signs of aspirations from LinkedIn to become an additional helpful business tool, enabling firms to push their merchandise, and sales folks to search out customers. Even so, as Associate in Nursing atmosphere for worker or B2B collaboration, it suffers from constant issues as Facebook – Associate in Nursing over-simplistic atmosphere for real work. thus I might characterize LinkedIn within the 1st class, a business-focused public social network – sensible for creating contact, however not thus sensible for deeper collaboration.

Of the 3 forms of network, it's internal worker networks that companies have created the least progress in deploying, despite analysis showing that these provide the best potential business worth. The promise of internal enterprise social networks remains mostly unfulfilled; within the next article during this series, we are going to examine the explanations for this.