Mainstay Salire Study: Hearsay Social Delivers Significant ROI to Businesses in Retail, Financial Services, Insurance, Real Estate, and Education

San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) June 15, 2012

Hearsay Social, provider of the leading enterprise social sales and marketing platform, today announced results of a comprehensive social media ROI study conducted by independent researcher Mainstay Salire, which reported increased sales, increased sales conversion rates, increased customer engagement, and decreased social media management costs for companies that had deployed the Hearsay Social platform. Mainstay Salire is a leader in measuring the value of technology investments.

Hearsay Social also announced today the release of Content Exchange, a content curation platform that allows marketers and salespeople to easily discover, curate, and post engaging updates to their profiles across all the major social networks, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+.

“For years, companies have sought to connect the dots between social media marketing and real return-on-investment (ROI), with increased sales being the holy grail,” said Craig LeGrande, Managing Director at Mainstay Salire. “Over the course of our interviews, we found that several customers using Hearsay Social reported jumps in sales conversion rates. One retailer, for example, doubled sales tied to specific promotions, largely due to the ability of marketers to design more attractive deals with targeted local social media offerings.”

Hearsay Social enables enterprises to engage with their customers via social media at every level of the organization–from brand to region to local stores, agents, or employees. Hearsay Social delivers enterprise-class scale, reliability, and regulatory compliance for financial services, insurance, retail, and other distributed organizations on social media. Today, tens of thousands of company brand ambassadors use Hearsay Social to deepen customer relationships across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+.

“We launched Hearsay Social on a vision that social media would forever transform the business-to-customer relationship,” said Hearsay Social CEO Clara Shih. "After seeing the results of Mainstay’s study, we’re delighted to say with certainty that our customers across multiple industries are reporting real ROI from their social marketing initiatives.”

Study Findings

The research report by Mainstay Salire, entitled “Social Media ROI: Quantifying the Benefits of Social Media Marketing Platforms for the Enterprise,” (download here) highlighted the following findings:

•     Several companies reported jumps in sales conversion rates, with one retailer doubling sales tied to specific promotions.
•     One insurance company saw a 150% to 420% increase in their local fan base, depending on the type of agent page.
•     Local agents, stores, and branch managers that adopted Hearsay Social saw a 2 to 5 times increase in their local fan base over locations that didn’t.
•     One insurance company saw 60% to 150% increase in lives covered for advisors, depending on tenure of advisor with insurer.
•     A financial services firm reduce time needed for compliance teams to review social media content by 50%
•     Another financial services firm that made a switch between social media management vendors reported a “night-and-day difference in customer service between the old vendor and Hearsay Social.”
•     One educational institution increased its Facebook fan base by 189% at sites that adopted Hearsay Social.
•     One commercial real estate company used Hearsay Social to cut content creation and local distribution time by 50%.
•     Another major insurance company using Hearsay Social reported that local social media pages attracted 10 times more fans than the corporate page.

Mainstay Salire conducted a series of in-depth customer interviews across a diverse set of industries. The target audience was primarily senior marketing leadership at each customer. The interviews explored key aspects of the customer’s social media programs, including objectives and scope of the Hearsay Social implementation, its impact on the revenue generation process, customer engagement and operational efficiencies. Mainstay conducted additional research and analysis before compiling the findings in a final report. Customer identities were hidden to respect the confidentiality of study participants.

About the Hearsay Social Platform

For enterprises with large sales organizations or store networks, Hearsay Social’s social sales and marketing software will enable your salespeople to increase revenue using social media by acquiring and continuously engaging customers on social platforms. Hearsay Social is the only software that increases revenue, referrals, and renewals by transforming the entire enterprise into a social business, including sales, marketing, compliance, and HR.

● Hearsay Social Sales Module for easy social media page and profile management for non-technical sales users, one-click publishing of content and campaigns provided by corporate marketing teams, and intuitive personal analytics.
● Hearsay Social Marketing Module for the sophisticated needs of social media marketing teams. Manage hundreds of corporate social media pages and review thousands of sales-managed pages. Easily manage thousands of apps and posts per day and suggest engaging content to employees, stores, or branches. Now including Content Exchange to discover, curate, and share content from content partners.
● Hearsay Social Compliance Module for FINRA/SEC compliant infraction monitoring, capturing, archiving, and Rogue Page Finder.
● Hearsay Social Enterprise IT Module including single sign-on (SSO), LDAP directory integration, and integration with CA Siteminder and HP Autonomy to deliver security, compliance, ease of use, and scale.

About Hearsay Social

The world’s largest companies, including Northwestern Mutual, Thrivent Financial, State Farm, Farmers Group, and 24 Hour Fitness, use Hearsay Social’s award-winning technology platform to achieve regulatory compliance, build stronger customer relationships, and bolster their brand across all the major social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. Hearsay Social, a SIFMA strategic partner, has raised $21M from Sequoia Capital, NEA, and top executives from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, and YouTube, and is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices in New York and Ohio.

Hearsay Social Blog: blog.hearsaysocial.com
Facebook: facebook.com/hearsaysocial
Twitter: @HearsaySocial
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/hearsay-social
Google+: plus.google.com/106448408037721525562

About Mainstay Salire

Mainstay Salire is a recognized leader in quantifying and communicating the value of technology investments as well as an industry leader in the development of value-based sales tools to leading companies such as Cisco, EMC, and Oracle. Founded in 2001, Mainstay Salire serves as an independent advisor to some of the most admired companies in the world. Visit http://www.mainstaysalire.com for more details.

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