2002 – Friendster launches; 2003 – MySpace arrives; 2004 – here comes Facebook; 2005 – begins the YouTube era; 2006 – Twitter is here… The evolution of social media started 13 years ago.

Fast forward to 2015, social is no longer just a hype, however using social media in business is still a huge challenge for marketers.

But things seem to be changing.

This year’s Altimeter Group Social Business benchmark research uncovered something very interesting: For the first time, an important shift in priorities is happening – strategists are moving from scaling consumer engagement in social to making a larger enterprise-wide shift and integrating social across the entire business.

Isn’t this something that social media experts have been preaching to clients for years? Back in 2013 when I was doing my research on social media for sustainability, one of the main issues was that both social media and sustainability were treated as standalone disciplines within businesses, whereas they should be fully integrated throughout organisations.

So, why should you care?

Consider this: McKinsey recently found that the impact of social media on buying decisions is greater than previously estimated and is growing fast. Social recommendations induce an average of 26% of purchases across all product categories, roughly two-thirds of that impact is direct meaning that recommendations play a critical role at the point of purchase. The remaining third is indirect with social media having an effect at earlier decision-journey touch points – for example, when a recommendation creates initial awareness of a product or interactions with friends or other influencers and helps consumers to compare product attributes or to evaluate higher-value features.

We are seeing the importance of social and some progress being made, but there are still a few areas that companies need to work on to fully integrate social within the core of the business.

State of Social Business: Four Key Challenges

According to Altimeter, there are four key areas that need improvement:

1. Digital integration

Only 39% of organisations have managed to fully integrate social into digital and only 36% believe they have a multi-year digital strategy that includes social initiatives in place. Interestingly, 24% of B2B companies consider social separate from digital and have no plans to integrate both. 

2. Leadership engagement

More engagement from leaders is needed to expand social media’s use as a general business tool, especially when it comes to breaking down silos internally. However, only 27% of executives at the VP/Director level are active on social and only 9% of the C-Suite, meaning that education is still needed among top-level executives why they need to jump on social. 

3. Employee advocacy

60% of respondents had employee engagement programmes in the planning or in their first year of use with an interest in employee advocacy growing to 191% since 2013. However, even though these initiatives speak of the need for a stronger collaboration with HR, only 19% say that HR is regularly engaged in cross-department working groups. 

4. Social media advertising

55% of respondents name developing an integrated digital content strategy as top social business priority for 2015: 38% of surveyed organisations plan to spend more than 20% of their total advertising budgets on social media channels in 2015 (up from 13% in 2014). The issue is that many companies have their ads department working on social advertising, others have their social media team engaged in that role. These two separate advertising departments and teams have to be better aligned for maximum value.

The below infographic offers some more insights into the top areas for improvement:

As you can see, social goes beyond just marketing and communications. It underpins every stage of the customer and employee experience journey. But how do you create and support it?