After the initial social listening exercise, finding out what is being said about your company and your competitors in the online arena, deciding where you are in terms of your social media maturity will help to give more clarity and show you the answer to the ever occurring question ‘What Next?’.
One fundamental and novel approach to establish your company’s social media maturity comes through a 5-stages model from Forrester Research. It splits businesses into laggards (dormant stage), late majority (testing stage), early majority (coordinating stage), early adopters (scaling and optimizing) and innovators (empowering employees).
Forrester may have undertaken this study to answer questions of how businesses change by adopting social marketing tools however we found that this model could also be a good starting point for companies to reflect on and establish where they are at this moment in time and having established the maturity level the way towards a more unified, coordinated approach lays open.
