Social Media Usage (Nov 2015)

Part 3 of 4 Blog Series

(If you have read Parts 1 & Part 2, skip to next section)

At nooQ we have created a product to revolutionize team communications.

Yammer started with their Facebook style, newsfeed approach.

Slack has perfected the conversational chat interface.

We think they are both flawed for the workplace.

We have built a product that won every product award at Socialnow.org

We’ve had a lot of demand for new features and new products visualizing email, visualizing social data and other overloaded, noisy systems.

nooQ has huge potential, but we can’t build everything at once.

So we created a survey on our existing team communication product, plus we wanted some research on what to build next.

We also built a real time visualisation on Twitter data, allowing you to turn up and down the volume on people and subjects.

But we needed to examine current usage of email, enterprise social networks, social media and file sharing. We needed to quantify the demand, in order to focus on the right things.

The results were somewhat surprising.

We had 102 completed surveys from participants. We had very carefully selected participants and were delighted with the responses and comments.

Survey Results on Social Media Usage

Given that we asked a professional audience, not real surprise that Linked-In came top and the other two most popular were Facebook and Twitter. Slightly surprising how low Instagram and Pinterest were.

For a long time when the results were coming in Linked-in was winning. A few years ago they would never have appeared on the list, but the amount of noise on there is way too much.

We wanted to get a feel on how many people were broadcasting compared to actually having a conversation and using Social Media for customer support.

People want more followers, leads and customers as well as less noise, although interesting that only 32% wanted to spend less time managing it. Do you think people like spending lots of time on social or they don’t spend much time managing it?

nooQ Social

We have a built a live demo for what nooQ can do for Twitter data. Basically instead of Twitter’s linear activity stream which you have to read from newest to oldest, what we do is visualize posts, based on popularity to YOU.

Not twitter moments for the whole population on the platform, just you. So sorting, filtering posts based on users and/or topics that are important.

So for a financial organisation, you can turn up #customerservice and let all the customer service reps only see customer enquiries, mute RTs, mute spam, mute specific users or subjects. You can also dive down into sub categories and related posts. If you have a need for this, get in touch.

Our Conclusions

Similar to our findings on e-Mail usage, there is a definite problem, a need for a better solution and people want our product. Although the what people would pay for that product is not strong enough for us to build a nooQ product to filter and visualise your entire social feeds.

There is a demand to do it on a larger scale, for business and enterprise customers using it for research or finding followers or finding leads. Again, we will leave this till later in our product roadmap.

There are a lot of social media listening products, although for us, they don’t go deep enough, nor are they accurate enough in finding content whether that be users, research or leads. You still have to apply human grunt work to sort, filter and apply intelligence.

There are a few exceptions, but there are better opportunities for us to crack first of all.

Linked-In is a classic. For the first 50% of responses, Linked-In was leading as the most overloaded social network that required our volume controls for people and content, to turn down the noise. Two years ago, over publishing on Linked-in was not an issue.

It is overloaded with more content than you can read in a lifetime. Obviously it is in their interest for you to spend more time on there reading everything.

Yet their Partner program is very selective. Using what we have built in nooQ, we could easily find more leads, expertise and filter content but there are a few key data points, you can’t access unless an official Linked-in Partner. We applied, we were rejected but not to be disheartened, it is one we will try again.

Twitter and Facebook have more open APIs that we can visualize and extract more relevant content. Again, that’s one we may come back to in the near future.

What are we going to do then? What are we going to build next?

Stay tuned for the final part 4 next week.