In the wake of the IPO last Friday, there has been much hand wringing about all things Facebook – user growth, advertiser spending, mobile strategy, stock price. From our seat as a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer, we see businesses doing more on Facebook every day. And that trend extends beyond Facebook.

Spredfast put out a release today that begins the conversation about businesses adopting social media management platforms to engage with their customers in a strategic, ongoing way.

More people
How many of your company’s employees are social on behalf of the business?  How many will be social on behalf of the business one year from now?  Two years from now?

As I’ve pointed out in earlier blog posts, being social is evolving.  The next step in that evolution is enabling 100’s or increasingly 1000’s of employees to be social, in an organized way, all the time.  The public social networks give businesses the opportunity to communicate and engage with the market in a new way.  How fast is this evolving?  The typical Spredfast customer has increased their number of “users” 10x in the past 6 months.  There is no sign this trend will slow down.

More places
Where is your business engaging on social?  On a Facebook brand page (or application)? Twitter?  YouTube?  LinkedIn?  Slideshare?  Pinterest?  A business must meet its customers wherever they…

Today’s post is by Jason Falls, CEO of Social Media Explorer and author of No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide To Social Media Marketing. Register for Spredfast’s upcoming Spruce up Your Social webinar on May 15th to hear Jason talk about Creating and Using Great Social Content.

The challenge most social media practitioners face in terms of their content efforts in today’s social media world is concocting the perfect balance of true engagement — posts that are audience-centric and conversational — and business drivers — posts that lead an audience to calls to action that help the company quantify success from their social media channels. Granted, there are those companies who use social media marketing for awareness, customer retention or service or other strategic purposes that aren’t primarily focused on the bottom line, but those are few and far between in our what’s-my-ROI driven world.

The answer is an enigma of sorts. There’s no formula, regardless of what the gurus and experts say. One in 10 can be about you? One in eight? One in five? No one knows unless or until you implement complex testing of the variables to see what your own audience will tolerate. Even companies that complete that step and decide on one-in-whatever quickly find that audiences change…

Spring is here, it’s a time for new life and fresh starts, from deep cleaning our houses to weeding out that old garden and planting new bulbs to bloom in the Summer. For social strategists, it’s a time to assess quarter-year performance and find new ways to spruce up social programs.

Just in time for spring cleaning, we’ll be kicking off a new series next week entitled “Spruce up Your Social for Spring.” The 3-part webinar series will provide insightful knowledge and share real world stories from industry analysts and leaders Jeremiah Owyang, Michael Brito and Jason Falls, as well as enterprise brands and agencies Intuit, Aramark and Social Distillery. From top-of-mind priorities to compelling opportunities and challenges for social business, the group will dive deep into the three areas where we most often hear companies expressing a need — creating compelling content in social, understanding and delighting social customers and operationalizing social media.

Pencil the following dates and times in on your calendars to get your dose of social ideas and inspiration over the coming month and a half. We’ll be using the hashtag #SocialSpruce to share information, curate insights and build out the conversation before, during and after the series, so follow along and chime in.

Utilizing and Creating Great Content in Social

Tuesday, May 15 at 11am PST

Jason Falls,…