• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, September 18, 2013

Awareness, customer satisfaction, share of voice, and lead generation are the top four social business performance metrics that companies seek from social networks, according to a recent survey. Companies with more than 10,000 employees, however, are likely to consider customer satisfaction the No.1 metric.

A survey of more than 900 marketing and technology executives sponsored by Oracle highlights how organizations leverage social technologies and practices. Results show that transitioning to a socially enabled enterprise has become a priority for business executives, but they also identify challenges that organizations need to overcome. Leader Networks, and Social Media Today also participated in the survey.

There is widespread adoption of social platforms in businesses, and the majority adopt these platforms for the data. About 45% of organizations surveyed use at least three social platforms, compared with 27% that use between six and eight and 12% that use one to two. Some 97% of survey respondents said it will become important for successful organizations to become socially enabled enterprises. In fact, 72% said leveraging social media will become very important for the future success of their organizations.

Becoming a socially accepted business provides increased visibility with prospective customers, closer relationships with existing customers, increased customer loyalty and advocacy, and greater awareness of customer needs.

It turns out that organizations with 50,000 or more employees are much further along the path to become social of which 46% reported they are already socially enabled, compared with nearly one-third of companies with less than 5,000 employees.

Some 60% plan to integrate social business metrics into their customer care initiatives in the next 12 months, but 43% of executives said it would take their organizations more than a year to leverage social throughout their businesses.

Businesses in the United States lag in their use of social insights: Organizations outside of the U.S. are significantly more likely to use social business insights for new product development and research and development. In fact, 38.6% of non-U.S. companies use social insights, compared with 29.5% in the United States, according to the report.