Take your seat at the table: How to expand social’s influence

Publish a post or hold it back. Escalate the complaint or wait. Put more budget behind the idea or pivot it.

Social professionals make dozens of calls like this every week, and have to commit before they know how they’ll turn out.

The information that could tip those odds in your favor is already available on social, in real time, before it shows up anywhere else. These same data points can also be used to expand social’s influence and drive more impact for the business. For most teams, the problem is getting those insights into the right hands. Our research found that 93% of professionals say that feeding social insights into business decisions matters for growth, but only 10% can turn a signal into an action within hours and just 36% said insights regularly influence decisions outside marketing. Additionally, 86% say they have missed real business opportunities in the last two years because insight arrived late, stayed siloed or went unused.

This report gives social media professionals a model for closing that gap. Starting with the channels you already control, it shows how to extend your influence outward until social insights become a trusted input across the whole organization.