Between 2010 and 2012, social media shifted from being solely a consumer communication platform to a powerful business tool allowing marketers to drive ROI and build consumer relationships. Social networking interest seemed to peak in 2012. Pinterest expanded its reach into businesses with new features, Instagram launched it's web version, and Facebook not only added Instagram but several other strategic weapons to it's arsenal. With all of this moving and shaking, and monetization of social media, the rise of social media management systems became mainstream and almost wholly adopted by marketing teams and departments. Dashboards like HootSuite led the charge by empowering marketers the ease of having everything is one spot. Here's how 2012 looked from and organizational adoption of social media according to Altimeter Group:
It's not hard to see why marketing was the main focus of these platform aggregators and soon there was an extremely convoluted space where tools like Spredfast, Sprinklr, Sprout Social and others joined HootSuite for a share of the social media marketing pie. In fact, here are all of the social media marketing dashboards listed by Altimeter in 2012 when only a handful existed the previous year:
As 2013 hit, marketing was nearing max adoption of social media, but now it was time for social recruiting and social customer support to take the stage. Social made serious impacts on how recruiters and talent managers did their jobs. The other department and industry that got disrupted by social media was customer service. As 2013 got under way, here's a look at how far social penetrated customer service:
As consumers began adopting social media and using it as an avenue to vent or talk about their purchase or purchase options, CS teams desperately needed a way to service these customers while protecting their brand's online sentiment. Thus the rise of customer experience or social customer support platforms like Conversocial found their way to securing a place in the landscape by offering a specialized solution for customer experience.
According to all of the numbers and trends, the next department to adopt social media exponentially is Sales. Social selling has moved beyond a potential fad and into a must-do for any organization seeking to succeed in a world of modern selling. With the mainstream looking to reach high on the social spectrum, budget and adoption for specialized social selling software will show the most exponential growth in 2015. Platforms like rFactr are poised perfectly to offer a specialized solution to an industry stuck in the weeds of having to pigeon whole their revenue generating sales activities into marketing-first solutions.
Look for 2015 to be about social selling.