Hootsuite Announces Social Business Benchmark

NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK--(Marketwired - Oct. 22, 2014) -

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Hootsuite, the world's most widely used social relationship platform, today released its survey on social adoption in the enterprise from Connect via Hootsuite: New York. The Hootsuite Social Business Benchmark showed that the majority of organizations surveyed believe social media is critical to staying competitive and engaging audiences, yet they face challenges in deriving value from the data they mine from social and aligning departments.

"While social media is a part of everyday life for consumers, effectively integrating social in the workplace hasn't been as easy," said Ryan Holmes, CEO of Hootsuite. "Nearly all survey respondents agreed that social data can improve the bottom line, yet turning that data into something actionable can be a challenge. Our focus on building an intuitive platform and education solutions is to address this problem and help organizations unlock the rewards of social media across the enterprise."

Eighty-four percent of respondents recognize the importance of using social media to enhance relationships with existing customers and 79 percent value the ability to monitor external conversations about their company. However, 67 percent of those surveyed find it difficult to assess the effectiveness of social media activities and another 60 percent cite that taking data gathered from social media and turning it into something actionable is a challenge for their company. This highlights a missed opportunity by many organizations to translate digital interactions into valuable action, given McKinsey Global Institute's recent report that organizations can unlock up to $1.3 trillion in annual business value using social technologies.

Key Findings:

• Organizations realize the importance of social media, however, many struggle to capitalize on the data mined from users.
  • Organizations cite social as important: The majority of respondents (88 percent) agree that social media is important to maintain a competitive edge.
  • Data insights are rarely used: Less than half (40 percent) of these organizations said they were using data gained from social media to improve their bottom line. Sixty percent stated they were challenged to find actionable use for data collected.
• Use of social media is becoming more widespread across all departments, yet departments are not always working together.
  • Social is increasing across departments: Nearly three in four respondents (72 percent) agree the number of departments using social media is growing.
  • Aligning campaigns is a challenge: A majority (64 percent) of respondents whose social media strategy is at least somewhat aligned stated that aligning strategy across departments was difficult
  • Strategy does not come easy: 62 percent of respondents said that creating a social media strategy was difficult in the first place.
• Social media is the new way to interact with customers and influencers.
  • Building relationships and reputation: A majority of respondents (84 percent) view enhancing relationships with existing customers as an area social media can contribute value to, as well as the ability to learn about the company's reputation (81 percent), and to monitor external communication (79 percent).
  • Social viewed as best vehicle to engage with audiences: 73 percent of respondents value social media's capability to resolve customer complaints and questions.

This survey was conducted online by Harris Poll on behalf of Hootsuite. More than 750 interviews were collected among current or prospective clients of Hootsuite in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Germany, Australia, Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. Interviews were conducted in English and took place between January 7, 2014 and October 1, 2014. Invitations were sent by Harris Poll and no mention of Hootsuite was made.

To learn more about The Hootsuite Social Business Benchmark, sign up for the webinar on Wednesday, November 5, 2014 at 8:00am PT / 11:00am ET / 4:00 pm GMT, hosted by Hootsuite's Jeanette Gibson, vice president of customer experience and community, and Susan Perry, senior product marketing manager.

To address this gap in scaling social, Hootsuite also unveiled its Global Agency Partner Program today, a new initiative for equipping large, global agencies with the education, tools and support to accelerate enablement of social business across their enterprise clients.

More Information:

• Webinar: https://socialbusiness.hootsuite.com/webinar-social-business-benchmark.html

• Blog Post: http://blog.hootsuite.com/social-business-benchmark

• Media Kit: http://media.hootsuite.com/media-kit

About Hootsuite

Hootsuite is the world's most widely used social media relationship platform. More than 10 million users, including 744 of the Fortune 1000 companies, trust Hootsuite to manage their social media programs across multiple social networks from one integrated dashboard. Learn more about how Hootsuite is revolutionizing communication at www.hootsuite.com.

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