In my last post, I provided an overview of how to measure impact of a digital or social media initiative. But before you can measure the impact, you need to be able to create an inventory of what all activities in your organization can use these media.
In this post, let’s look at the findings of a survey I conducted in order to identify how organizations use social media.
First, let’s look at some profile data. There’s a lot more than what’s below, however, i’m sharing only a subset.
Profile of Participants
In terms of verticals or industry segments, the participants’ organizations were spread across all major industries. In fact, “All others” category, shown in the chart below, consisted of more than a quarter of participants and pretty much all industries were represented. However, bulk of participants were from service-oriented industries such as IT (21%), BFSI (8%), Consulting (11%) and Technology (10%).
Fig 1: Organizations’ primary business
About 37% of participants reported they worked for organizations that have more than 10,000 employees. Another 20% said their organizations employed between 500 to 9999 employees. These are representative of large organizations that typically have several complex processes and challenges.
Fig 2: Total number of employees in organization
Usage Analysis
Participants were asked to select activities for which they could use social media. Results for activities that made maximum use of social media are shown below. This figure shows top 15 activities based on number of responses. Most marketing oriented activities figure in this list. That is not surprising. In addition, many use cases from other activities also figure in this list. In particular, social hiring (55%), customer support (53%), and knowledge management (52%) are amongst the most common activities for which social media is used.
Fig 3: Social media usage in value chain activities: Top 15 activities
Another aspect of usage is in terms of social media tools. Users use these tools for any social media activity and so in addition to measuring usage of social media within activities, this is another way to measure usage. The figure below shows the percentage corresponding to usage of different social media tools. Social networking sites such as Facebook and Linkedin were at the top with 86% participants using them. Facebook’s usage for social media marketing and Linkedin for social hiring are well known use cases, so this result is not unexpected. This was followed by Blogs (64%), Video/Presentation sharing such as YouTube (59%), Instant messaging like WhatsApp (58%), Microblogs such as Twitter (56%) and Document and File Sharing such as Dropbox (55%).
Fig 4: Social media tools usage
There’s lot more and i’ll share more findings in future posts. Meanwhile, i’m working on a set of tools that uses all this data as a basis for further analysis — something that organizations will be able to use for their own digital initiatives.