Exploratory study reveals limited productivity and expectations around business social media marketing tools in sales teams, suggesting a need for better integration.
Business organizations are readily exploring how to incorporate social networking in their business models. Business social networking tools such as Facebook and LinkedIn are being used by organizations to connect with customers and otherwise help market their products in both b2c and b2b environments. Gartner Inc. indicates that expectations surrounding the benefits of business social networking tools may be exceeding the benefits those tools actually deliver. This exploratory study examines the extent to which salespeople use business social networking tools and their perceptions of the effectiveness of those tools. The findings indicate usage of business social networking tools by salespeople is limited, and that improvements to productivity are limited. Despite the perceived limitations, salespeople believe that these tools will at some point be critical to sales success. The findings support Gartner Inc. ’s contention that expectations may exceed perceived benefits.
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Inks et al. (2012) studied this question.
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