I have spent my past 4 years implementing social marketing technologies in Enterprises. Since few people have actually been confronted with the Software as a Service approach in Social Media I will describe first what Social marketing means and how Enterprises approach that topic.

Social Marketing covers various disciplines such as social ads, community moderation and publishing, engagement strategies, monitoring, reporting – also blending in with the utilisation of user data acquired through the adjacent digital strategy.

Many of these disciplines have been managed desperately by different teams and departments or agencies. While most of the work is or has been done manually, the rise of automation service going beyond the original platforms (Facebook, Instagram or Twitter etc.) has created an exploding industry of innovative start ups and established software houses hustling to serve a software solution to an environment that is permanently changing. Recently, the big and small vendors have been trying to tweak their software to enable an all in one approach, which consolidates the Data collected from all disciplines and makes it more actionable.

More social media channels that apparently grow more popular, combined with more features and functionalities in the channels and a variety of decentralised contributors are a big challenge for enterprises that qualify as such by their size of operating various B2C brands in various markets.

Enterprises can be conglomerates of Brands acquired by Holdings such as MAF, Chalhoub Group, Azalea, Al Shaya or could be Retail and FMCG giants such as P&G, A mobile operator Group like Etisalat or Landmark and Apparel. Even a big Creative agency with many clients could be considered an enterprise.

For these companies the complexity is multiplied because they have to manage the above for maybe 50+ different brands, on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, youtube – together probably with an in-house team or a network of agencies. From my experience most prefer to outsource the work (or risk!?) to a variety of agencies (read also the the post on the holy trinity of agencies.) Recently very few of these enterprises have decided to retain all of the disciplines of social marketing in-house.

While the size of the enterprises operations in social marketing is a big challenge, it has also major opportunities. If the enterprise manages to consolidate all the data from all brands (and all stakeholders of the disciplines) in a centralised actionable social CRM  – the sheer size of actionable data will allow to identify and cluster consumers across brands. Based on this a high level of personalised communication can be executed and media budget efficiently allocated.

I would be happy to hear your thoughts on this!