There are now over 2.3 billion active social media users, a rise of 176 million in the last year (2015-2016) alone.

Speaking to electricians, plumbers, drainage contractors and the like, the general perception seems to be that social networks are a “nice to have”, something which is being used by the most progressive companies, but something which is not yet quite the right channel for the industry.

However, increasingly we are seeing people use social networks to find tradesmen.  Individuals are demanding quicker and more transparent access to services and what people demand at home, they also expect from their work environments or public services.

So what do you need to know?  How has social networking evolved and what are the benefits to your company of using social media?

The big changes which we have witnessed over the last 30 or 40 years have been driven by software and communications technology which has allowed person-to-person meetings to happen in a virtual environment, wherever you are.

Bulletin boards were the first electronic social networks with tools such as Prestel gaining a small band of users in the 70s and 80s.
Then came the web and the first real growth of the internet.

The World Wide Web developed quickly and was soon followed by what’s become known as Web 2.0.  This allowed people to easily edit websites and led, firstly, to people being able to create their own blogs and then to join forums and “social networks” such as Friends Reunited (which finally closed in 2016), Myspace (which is still around) and Facebook (which is massive).

Development continued with variations on the above, Linkedin for business, Ecademy and Twitter for the status update were three such examples.

In the enterprise space, products such as Yammer and Sharepoint tried to bring social networking into the workplace. The aim was to improve communications internally and enable the sharing of knowledge.  However, none of these networks have taken off to the same extent as the consumer networks, at least at this point in time.

But this is starting to change, Slack has been growing massively, companies like Okappy and Honeybook have launched and Linkedin has just been bought by Microsoft, no doubt looking to embed its network and information more deeply into its products (as they did with Skype).  Facebook is also trialling Facebook for Work.  So there’s certainly a lot going on.

There are many different social networks available. So for simplicity’s sake, I’ve grouped them into three specific areas: social media, market places and market networks.

Social media is what what most people are familiar with when talking about social networks. Companies include Facebook with over 1.5 billion users around the world.  Google+ with about 300 million users and Instagram with about 400 million users.

When talking about the number of users though, you have to take these figures with a pinch of salt.  Often networks are used sporadically over time.

In terms of engagement, the big winner is Facebook which reaches a much larger percent of the market whilst also seeing the most use as measured by the number of minutes spent online by their users.

An extension of social media is offered by more focused applications such as WhatsApp, Vine and Twitter.  Whereas Facebook offers a full suite of services from photo sharing, events planning, messaging and a timeline.  With Twitter for example, the main reason people use it is to post and see messages in your “timeline”.

Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat are other examples.  They all concentrate on one particular aspect of social media, i.e. messaging or photos, and do it really well.  This follows a trend in software in general, moving away from one large complex application that tries to do everything to having much larger number of small, focused applications that do a one or two things really well and then connect with other applications (via APIs) to accomplish other tasks.

Social media does tend to be considered a more consumer focused technology, at least at the moment.  However, an ever-increasing number of companies do use these channels well to promote their services and to form relationships with their customers.

Another type of network which is being talked about a lot at the moment is the electronic marketplace.

These have actually been around a while, think of Ebay and Ariba which both saw massive growth over the last decade.  However, market places have really started to gain momentum recently with the rise of companies like Uber, Airbnb and Tinder.

They get a lot of press attention as they’re often quite controversial and are often fighting existing regulation.  A lot of these marketplace are cannibalising entrenched and often vociferous industries.  Uber and AirBnB in particular are getting a lot of stick over the States.

You’ll notice I put Tinder in the market places section. That was a bit tongue cheek, probably closer to social media but i think it serves to highlight the point that the different networks are not clearly defined, features do overlap.

The newest variant of social network is the market network and it’s expected to be the next big thing, see James Currier‘s (Silicon Valley VC) post on TechCrunch.

Market networks are similar to existing management systems from the likes of Oracle or SAP but tend to be much more focused, simpler and available anywhere via the internet.  By combining cloud-based job management software with the benefits of social media and market-places, market networks are expected to generate the next big area of growth.

Examples include Honeybook, which brings customers, event planners and venues together to make planning and running events easier.  Angel list, where investors can combine into syndicates and invest in startups.  And of course – us.  Okappy, a market network for the service sector.

The social networking space is large, diverse and rapidly changing.  But if you’re a business, especially if you’re a small business like an electrical contractor, plumber or drainage contractor.  How do you use social networks to enhance your customer service?  And where do you start?

Social media can be used to obtain customer feedback.  And there’s two main ways you can do this.  1) By monitoring what’s already being said, and ideally joining in with the conversation or by 2) creating a way for customers to get in touch with you.

If you’re a large organisation, particularly if you’re a public sector organisation like a train operator, health service or council, there is likely to already be a lot of activity from the end consumer on platforms like Twitter.

There are lots of tools available for monitoring social media.  Twitter, for example, allows you to search for your name or mentions.  The use of hashtags is also a popular way of grouping tweets together.  Often, and especially when customers have strong emotions to your service, twitter users will use a hashtag or quote your twitter handle.  If they quote your twitter handle, then you will see this as a message in your timeline. Otherwise you can monitor for the use of particular hashtags or even just your company name.

The hashtag was popularised by Twitter but it is now being used more widely across many social networks as a way to group messages about certain subjects.

Other tools include Hootsuite which lets you monitor multiple accounts.  More specialised tools are also available, for example Rail-Apps. Rail-Apps is a small company based in Ipswich doin exciting things around social media monitoring to get an idea of how people feel about your service – good or bad.  They allow train operators to capture questions and providing a route to answering them, either from an existing database of answers of by routing the message to a call-centre operative.

On one side of the coin is being able to monitor existing conversations about your company or service.  The other side of the coin is actually putting in place systems or processes to improve what you’re doing.

I mentioned how Rail-apps can identify queries and route them to the right person. In London, Enfield Council announced it has hired its first virtual employee, Amelia, in June 2016.  Amelia will use artificial intelligence to learn how to respond to customers’ questions, thereby allowing the Enfield Council call-centre to concentrate on more complex queries.

But it doesn’t have to be as complicated as that. Simply being active on social media, responding to queries and joining in the conversation can have a positive effect to how people feel about your company and can turn bad feeling into good.

And communicating on social media is becoming more and more important.  According to a 2013 survey by J D Power, 67% of consumers have used a company’s social media channel for customer services.  The number of people using social media will have likely increased since then.

But beware, given the way people use social media, often short bursts of attention when they are bored, you need to respond to social media in a much more timely manner.  Typically within about 60 minutes at most, so the days of 9-5 customer service are long gone.

There are many examples of great customer service delivered via social media.  The above tweet received over 16,000 retweets and 12,000 likes when David Willis tweeted that he had gotten stuck in the Trafalgar Square store of Waterstones bookshop. Luckily Waterstone’s was monitoring their twitter feed.  Not only did they free him, they also responded with their own tweet 80 minutes later.  Think what could have happened if he was locked in all night!  He must have been reading an interesting book!

However, monitoring and responding to social media posts is not just about answering questions but also a way to keep an eye out on the competition, gather ideas for improving your business and understand what your customers want.

And with regards to large companies like Facilities Managers, you don’t have to think of customers as just the general public.  You can share ideas and monitor feedback from your own staff or users of your service.

The medium might change depending on your company’s policies i.e., some companies may not allow Facebook at work – although with the rise of mobile this is getting harder and harder to police.  Even when consumer networks are banned in the work place, there are often business-focused social networks which may already be used by your company.

Even if you don’t use social networks within your company yet, the recent purchase of Linkedin by Microsoft is likely to lead to more social features being available within current applications such as Word, Outlook or Excel.

Using social networks to post, respond and review messages is one form of communication, but social networks can also be used to enhance communication in other ways.

You could publish a calendar online allowing users of your services to see when jobs have been booked or to see the job statuses.

This could save people having to call you to find out what is happening with their job.  When speaking to our customers, they often mention that  customers or users of your service will forgive you for a lot of things, as long as you keep them up-to-date.  If you’re going to miss an appointment, or a job is delayed, if the customer are made aware, then they can plan around it.  If your customers don’t know what’s happening, they will feel abandoned, and ultimately they’re likely to abandon you.

Even if you’re not selling your services direct to the general public, there are still lessons to be learned from other companies who use social media. You could build your reputation through thought articles or images of your work or even offer guidance and advice.

You may think that it’s more relevant to tradesmen selling to the general public, but educating your users can save you time and cost.  It could reduce call outs for simple jobs or even minimise those jobs that are not really required i.e., the person who calls up an IT help desk wanting someone to look at his computer because the screen is black!

When speaking to new customers, many of them talk about having to chase their engineers for their timesheets or job sheets or even just having to ring around to see whether their engineers are on site.

They also talk about inflexibility caused by poor communication. Sending guys off to do a job, only to then get a call from their customer with a change of requirements.

Messaging platforms are ubiquitous on most people’s phones nowadays.  You could use messaging platforms to create groups of employees and then send messages to that group.  You can often attach documents or images to your messages which allows everyone to get information much quicker.

Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage on iOS are some examples of messaging apps.  More enterprise-driven solutions include Hipchat and Slack. They have the added benefits of integrating with other systems as well as the ability to search through messages.

As previously mentioned, market networks are the next evolution in job management.  They allow you to get away from paperwork or messaging altogether.  They are often designed for particular industries and help you manage your jobs, instantly seeing what is happening in real-time as your engineers update their information.

They also allow you to easily find information whether that’s a job history when you are out on site or being able to quickly search for all jobs for a particular customer or site.

Another gripe we hear often is duplication of work.  Staff copying information from one paper form to another or one application to another.  This gets even worse when you consider the wider supply chain.  A Facilities Management company may have their own job management system in-house where they can input and manage their jobs.  If you’re lucky this might have a web portal that allows subcontractors access, although this is often tacked on as an afterthought.

Even when this is the case, we often see our contractors having to take information from a web portal, a fax or an email, and then write that into their own job system. Whether that’s a folder full of job sheets, an Excel spreadsheet or more advanced job management software.

The information is often then printed out and given to the engineer who does the job and, if you’re lucky, brings the job sheet back at the end of the day for the admin staff to update their job management applications.  

That sounds like a lot of time and effort but it doesn’t stop there.  The admin staff will often have to take that information and key it into other systems, i.e., their accounting packages.  

These issues are multiplied further when you consider that in many industries work will be further subcontracted to other companies, which leads to more and more duplication at every level.

All this duplication and manual processing takes time and leads to errors.  Most people don’t like filling out paperwork.  This ultimately leads to less capacity as so much time is spent on paperwork.  Not getting accurate information can also lead to disputes, delayed or even forgotten invoices.

There are other costs which might seem trivial but often mount up.  Stationery for one, the cost of telephone calls trying to find out what is going on or increased spend on fuel as engineers have to come back to the office to pick up or drop off paperwork.

We conducted research with over 200 companies over the last couple of years and found that companies were losing on average about 10% of their turnover through duplication and increased administration.  And this is just in their own company, when you consider the duplication between customers and subcontractors then these costs are even greater.

With so many social networking platforms to choose from, where do you start?

When choosing a market-network, ideally you want to find one that specialises in your industry.  You might also want to think about its performance, reliability and ease of use.

Choosing a marketplace is more about liquidity, i.e., how many buyers and sellers are there, where are they based and what kind of review or feedback systems are in place.

As social media has been around a while, there is now a lot of choice.  So, depending on what you want to achieve, my advice would be to start small but start somewhere.

Setting up social media accounts couldn’t be easier, it’s growing and maintaining your presence which takes the time.  Trying to tackle too many channels can leave you overwhelmed, it can lead to messages being missed or responses being delayed which can quickly put people off.

I’d suggest choosing one or two networks, preferably use networks that you are already familiar with or ones that hold a particular interest.  If you like taking photos then try Instagram.  If you are already on Facebook then why not set up a company page.

It’s also worth asking your own customers what channels they use or at least considering your target demographics.  For instance, Pinterest has typically been female-focused although this is changing quickly. Snapchat has been very teenage-friendly although, again, that is changing to a much wider age group.

There is also a lot of software available which can help you manage your social networks.  Hootsuite is great for managing multiple social media accounts.  Buffer allows you to gather a lot of content then schedule the delivery of content to different channels at different times.

When publishing content, ideally you want to do it regularly and consistently so that your audience knows when new posts will be available.  This is also good for SEO.

You can often configure your social network settings to automatically send you push notifications to your phone or periodic emails telling you what’s happening on your channel.  This is ideal, as shown in the Waterstones case, if you get a message outside normal office hours.  Even if the network you are using doesn’t have alerts, you could always use Google Alerts to send you an email when a particular word or phrase is mentioned.

It might be worth hiring skills in house, or perhaps using existing skills in new ways.  If someone is writing an internal newsletter, they may be able to write one or more blog articles from it.

If you don’t have anyone who can manage your social media content internally,  there are plenty of options to bring in external resources.

There’s a world of marketing agencies, social media and content agencies, who will do all the work for you. They’ll create the content, and push it out across every possible channel. There’s obviously the cost involved. There’s also a risk that it won’t feel as “honest” or “genuine”. Part of the appeal of social media is the fact that customers can communicate directly with your company rather than a marketing agency.

The key to using social networks to improve your business, is taking the time to make it work. Initially it may seem like a drain on your own precious hours with little return.  However, as it becomes part of your day to day routine, you’ll start to gather momentum and, with relevant content, you’ll begin to build a following.

You’ve started using social networks to benefit your business, but how do you measure the effectiveness of what you are doing?

Gauging whether the work you’re doing on social media is successful can be tricky. Don’t simply judge it on how many likes or followers you have, although that is of course a great way to see how you’re performing.

Think about what you want to achieve. Do you want to promote a certain offer or just create awareness of your company’s brand? You might aim to add an additional 100 followers within the month, or aim to increase engagement by striving for a minimum number of shares per post. Whatever your goals, be sure to monitor them periodically to ensure your time and money is spent wisely.

One other piece of advice is not to pick too many goals.  We’ve found that 4-5 is optimal. Any more than that and it’s difficult to see the wood from the trees.

You want to see trends in your data but also understand what is causing those trends.  It might feel nice to see the number of likes go up but if you don’t know whether those likes are there because you posted a particularly interesting piece of content or because more people are linking to your site it will be difficult to replicate your success.

In summary, we outlined which networking options are available from social networks like Facebook, enterprise social networks like Yammer,  communication tools like Whatsapp and Slack or market networks like Honeybook or Okappy.

We showed how social networks can be used to improve your business. Whether that’s improving communication both internally or externally or by reducing costs through less duplication and manual processes.

The key takeaway, I believe, is to start small, but do something rather than nothing.  You can always improve as you get to grips with each network.  Once you get started then keep monitoring the effectiveness of what you’re doing.