Social media poised for bigger things

Stands to unlock $1.3-trillion in value

The most discussed topics on the network in 2013, according to Twitter, included low-budget movie #Sharknado (about a tornado of sharks), the birth of the #RoyalBaby and the 50th-anniversary of campy British sci-fi TV series #DoctorWho.

But beneath its glittery exterior of pop culture memes and cat GIFs, social media has proved an increasingly potent business tool.

A recent report from BMO Financial Group shows 57% of small businesses in Canada now use social media, a 42% rise from last year.

Business owners are using social networks to track sentiment about their company and their competitors, to recruit top employees and sell their products and services. At stake is more than just a few ‘Likes’ orF ace book friends.Mc Kinsey Global Institute estimates that social media stands to unlock a collective US$1.3-trillion in value for businesses.

This year, companies will be turning to social media to boost business in even more creative ways:

CUTTING PHONE

WAIT TIMES

The ability of customers to air their complaints via Twitter and Facebook — instead of waiting patiently on clogged phone lines — has shifted the balance of power in customer service.

A recent Nielsen survey shows more than half of all customers now turn to social media for redress; meanwhile, some 81% of Twitter users expect a same-day response to questions and complaints. With such potent tools in customers’ arsenals, expect to see companies shift resources to social media support in 2014.

The upside is significant cost savings and an easier way to manage the huge volumes of messaging generated on Twitter and Facebook.At Hoot Suite, for instance, a 17-person customer service team uses the company’s own tool to handle eight million users.

INTERNAL SOCIAL NETWORKING EDGING

OUT EMAIL

The basic idea of email has remained essentially unchanged since the first networked message was sent in 1971. And while it is great for one-on-one, formal correspondence, there are far better tools for collaboration.

For example, several business apps are borrowing features from popular networks including Facebook and bringing them into the office. This year, expect to see internal business networks such as Yammer make serious inroads into enterprise settings, enabling employees to form virtual work groups and exchange ideas on centralized, Facebook-like message boards. These tools put an end to tiresome email threads and can make relevant content accessible and searchable for the entire company.

USING TWITTER TO BOOST FOOT TRAFFIC

Native social media ads — the ones that appear in users’ Twitter and Facebook streams — exploded last year and now represent a $3.1-billion market. This year, savvy business owners will be able to avail themselves of some pretty sophisticated geo-location features built into these ads.

Twitter, for instance, just unveiled an option that lets businesses target users by zip or postal codes.PromotedT weets for the local pub or dry cleaner may pop up in your Twitter stream as you walk through a particular neighbourhood. Facebook has been using this kind of “geo-fencing,” since 2011, to help businesses better court high-value foot traffic.

TWITTER CLASSES

Among 2,100 firms surveyed by Harvard Business Review, only 12% of those using social media feel they do so effectively. To fill the gap, employers are turning to formal social media classes, often in the form of online courseware, similar to the Microsoft Office or Adobe training modules, with topics ranging from online etiquette to how to cultivate sales prospects on Twitter. The goal is to get both social newbies and social natives up to speed on how social media can serve as a productivity tool.

BIG DATA GETS FRIENDLIER FOR SMALL BUSINESS

For years, all the digital information businesses capture about their customers and their habits has been hyped as the secret to everything from boosting sales to improving customer loyalty. But collecting and making sense of this data has been out of reach of smaller businesses.

A new wave of user-friendly analytics software is set to hit the market, enabling non-experts to sort through terabytes of social media information. Cloud-based programs, such as Brandwatch and uberVU, let companies monitor message volume and sentiment around their brand and identify influential users on social media, just by plugging in a few keywords. They also spit out the kind of detailed, eyepleasing reports that, until recently, took stats experts days to prepare.

Software also is maturing, to do a better job at consolidating different social media functions — marketing, customer service, internal communication, analytics and advertising — into one social relationship platform. (I’m obviously biased toward HootSuite, but giants such as Adobe and Oracle also have offerings.)

Just as the Internet evolved from a niche tool to a commercial powerhouse, social media seems poised for far greater things than Justin Bieber gossip and Sharknado.