New York, New York

June 5-7, 2012

Spredfast put out a release today that begins the conversation about businesses adopting social media management platforms to engage with their customers in a strategic, ongoing way.

More people
How many of your company’s employees are social on behalf of the business?  How many will be social on behalf of the business one year from now?  Two years from now?

As I’ve pointed out in earlier blog posts, being social is evolving.  The next step in that evolution is enabling 100’s or increasingly 1000’s of employees to be social, in an organized way, all the time.  The public social networks give businesses the opportunity to communicate and engage with the market in a new way.  How fast is this evolving?  The typical Spredfast customer has increased their number of “users” 10x in the past 6 months.  There is no sign this trend will slow down.

More places
Where is your business engaging on social?  On a Facebook brand page (or application)? Twitter?  YouTube?  LinkedIn?  Slideshare?  Pinterest?  A business must meet its customers wherever they gather.  Each social network allows some form of communication with its flock.  What form?  That’s a moving target.  How much does it cost a business to communicate?  That’s a moving target too.

How many “places” on social does a business need to be in order to reach its customers?  Good question.  How far will you drive for a latte?  60% of Spredfast customers manage over 100 social “places”.  Some have as few as 10 “places” and others as many as 600.  And this market is just getting started.

More conversations:
How many customer conversations has your business had on social today? What are you learning? Is the market getting the right messages? We can all debate where Facebook or Twitter or YouTube will be in two years.  What I think we can bet on is that the human desire for social communication will not be abated.  People have had a taste and we won’t go backwards.  How will a business grow if it misses out on these conversations?  Spredfast customers are managing millions of conversations and this is growing rapidly.

Let’s do the math.  100’s to 1000’s of employees managing 10’s to 100’s of social “places” and millions of conversations around ever changing social network capabilities.

The social engagement platform will be the heartbeat of the social enterprise.  Don’t get left behind.

According to recent Spredfast customer data, businesses across the enterprise are working to expand their social engagement by making a stronger, concerted effort to sync social strategies across multiple channels, brands, geographies, functions and employees. A typical Spredfast customer manages an average of 15 brands, geographies or groups within the platform. Similarly, Spredfast customers are rapidly expanding the number of social accounts they manage in the platform. On average, large brands manage over 100 of their Facebook, Twitter and other social network accounts in Spredfast today, with some brands managing as many as 600 accounts.

Growing social engagement is leading to a significant increase in the number of people participating in social communication on behalf of their companies. The average Spredfast customer has ten times the number of users they had just six months ago.

“We are noticing an increase in social activity on many levels, in many departments, in many locations and on multiple channels, which is a clear statement from our customers that a social media management system is essential to today’s social business strategy,” said Rod Favaron, Spredfast CEO. “These findings mirror what social media experts and analysts have been telling us and as complexities of the social ecosystem continue to evolve, it will be increasingly important for businesses to seek a platform that will allow them to better operationalize their social engagement.“

Broad Industry Adoption

Further indicating a growing demand for social media management systems (SMMS), Spredfast has acquired 50 new customers since January. Now, with more than 250 customers in over 20 countries, Spredfast’s services span a diverse set of industries including retail, consumer packaged goods, financial services, hi tech and media. Recent customer acquisitions include restaurant chain, Jason’s Deli; interactive conference and festival, SXSW; global investment management firm, T Rowe Price; motor club and leisure travel organization, AAA; and global beauty company, Coty with expanded relationships with brands such as Rimmel London, Sally Hansen and OPI.

“We are always working to expand engagement and brand interactions with our customers on social networks,” said Jennifer Dalipi, Director of Digital Marketing at Coty Beauty.  ”Spredfast’s social business platform helps us work smarter, deliver new experiences faster and gain valuable insights into how our customers are interacting with our many brands on social.”

More Capabilities to Increase Companies’ Social Engagement

In answer to industry demand and rapid SMMS adoption, Spredfast has introduced significant new products and capabilities over the last six months that have contributed to its accelerated customer growth and engagement:

• Secure Social – For customers in regulated industries, Spredfast released the most comprehensive, secure deployment option in the SMMS market. Customers can now deploy Spredfast in a private virtual cloud with 256-bit encryption of all data, configure secure export to enterprise repositories and provide multiple levels of access security including IP restriction, enhanced password management and SSO via the SAML industry standard.

• Expanded Facebook Management & Analytics – Spredfast added tab creation and management capabilities to allow customers to add rich application experiences to their Facebook presence. In addition, Spredfast added a new Facebook Message Dashboard that provides more than 45 metrics per post – including virality and negative feedback – and provides the ability to compare effectiveness of messages across diverse campaigns and Facebook brand pages.

• Enhanced Productivity for Managing Social Conversations – Spredfast added a variety of capabilities to the Social Inbox to help brands with high volumes of engagement more efficiently manage their communication workload. Message delegation and tracking, the ability to define multi-step actions (macros) that can be executed with a single click, and a simplified publishing interface all help ensure that the right people are responding at the right time to engagement across all social networks.

In addition, one of the key drivers for enterprise adoption of the Spredfast platform is consolidation of all social activity one place. This simplifies many aspects of broad social adoption – from compliance management to analytics to connection to business impact.

“Spredfast helps us manage social engagement for select clients across multiple channels from a single platform,” said Lauren S. Warthan, senior manager, WCG. “With search streams and in-depth reporting analytics, we are able to optimize social activity and provide clients with insight on how social is advancing their business objectives.”

About Spredfast:

Based in Austin, Texas, Spredfast provides social business software for social media management that allows organizations to manage, monitor, and measure their social media programs, and the effectiveness of each piece of content, across multiple social media channels. Spredfast allows its clients to extend their branded content and engage with its audience from a single administration interface to the blogosphere and the major social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Foursquare. Some of the enterprise and agency adopters on board with Spredfast include AARP, Nokia, Bayer, HomeAway, Porter Novelli, ING Direct and AGAIN Interactive. For more information, visit http://spredfast.com/

Media Contact:
Amanda Tsang
pr@spredfast.com
601-336-6578

Today’s post is by Jason Falls, CEO of Social Media Explorer and author of No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide To Social Media Marketing. Register for Spredfast’s upcoming Spruce up Your Social webinar on May 15th to hear Jason talk about Creating and Using Great Social Content.

The challenge most social media practitioners face in terms of their content efforts in today’s social media world is concocting the perfect balance of true engagement — posts that are audience-centric and conversational — and business drivers — posts that lead an audience to calls to action that help the company quantify success from their social media channels. Granted, there are those companies who use social media marketing for awareness, customer retention or service or other strategic purposes that aren’t primarily focused on the bottom line, but those are few and far between in our what’s-my-ROI driven world.

The answer is an enigma of sorts. There’s no formula, regardless of what the gurus and experts say. One in 10 can be about you? One in eight? One in five? No one knows unless or until you implement complex testing of the variables to see what your own audience will tolerate. Even companies that complete that step and decide on one-in-whatever quickly find that audiences change and with them, so do the thresholds of me versus you content.

Sadly, it doesn’t seem that even the top social brands have paid attention to the anecdotal recommendations of the guru set. I recently set up filtered circles and lists of the top 20 or so consumer brands according to the Dachis Group’s Social Business Index on Google+, Facebook and Twitter. Scrolling down through each stream, my analysis of the posts can be summed up as follows:

“Me, me, me, me, me, support our charity, me, me, me, me, me, me, me.”

Through about 80 or so posts, I found three that I thought, “Cool! That’s pretty interesting for the audience.” Congratulations to Coke, Ford Trucks and Sony for breaking through the noise of self-promotion with something decent.

But there has to be a balance if companies are going to leverage social media for bottom-line effecting business metrics. Ford Truck’s post, asking who was going to win the World Series as baseball’s opening day commenced, needs to be accompanied by product information or other incentives for the audience to actually want to buy a Ford Truck or the stream becomes less social media marketing and more community service. If most companies treat social media as the latter, guess what gets cut come budget time?

So how do we know how much “me” is too much? Unfortunately, the answer is (as it often is), “It depends.”

Ask yourself a couple of questions to level-set the expectations:

• Why is our audience following us here in the first place?
• What did we promise them when we asked them to like, follow or fan us here?
• What business reason are we using this platform or channel for?
• Do we have other, more effective, channels for other business functions at play?

If your audience followed you because you promised them a weekly coupon, then they’re an audience that is there for the appeal of the deal. You can be more commercially oriented, if not totally deal driven. If you’re using the platform for customer service, and measuring customer service metrics through it (issued resolved, cost savings from diverting call center activity, etc.), then maybe smacking the audience in the face with “buy my stuff” posts isn’t a good ideas. If you have the automated deal or coupon feed on Twitter or a special email list, remind your fans of those channels for deals and focus on more true engagement around product feedback, fun uses of the product and the like.

Still unclear about the proper mix? Ask your audience. A really engaging post might be, “We’ve got the opportunity to share deals and coupons with you here. Is that something you’d be interested in? Should we focus more on sharing fun tips and tricks? How do you want us to use this channel to make your experience with us better?”

And then you can, of course, test. Go two weeks with a 10:1 ratio of “conversation” or “engagement” oriented posts to calls-to-action. Measure the click throughs, comments, Likes and so on. Then go two weeks with a 5:1 ratio to see if the results change. If they don’t, dial it in to a 2:1 ratio and see what happens. Read and react based on your audience’s activity. But don’t assume the ratio you land on is always the rule. Remember you’re measuring human reaction. Humans are fickle and change their minds and attitudes daily. I’d suggest repeating the ratio test every 3-4 months until you get comfortable with a pace that works for your audience.

As much as measurement and quantification can give you a good idea of how often you can mix the “buy now” posts with the “how are you” ones, I’m still a big fan of using simple logic. Look at your last 30 posts on a given channel. Would you want to see those pieces of content in your stream? Would your not-so-social-media-savvy friend? Put yourself in the mindset of your audience and just do a gut-check. “Is this too noisy? Too promotional? Is it interesting?” Just asking those questions can help you better understand where your recipe for success produces the best taste.