Social Collaboration Tools for Business refers to Web sites that allow people to create and share information online. Businesses use these tools for two main reasons: to establish one or more websites where team members can collaborate on specific projects, and to manage the many aspects of the organization’s social media presence. One popular configuration that works well for larger organizations is to establish a corporate wiki that everyone in the company shares access to, while maintaining individual wikis for each team or department.
Social collaboration tools enable people to share ideas, discuss problems and plan. Thoughts formed on social collaboration tools map to the processes of the organization, and bring these processes to life by bringing together elements such as people, content, and tools. These elements are called the collaborative elements chart (CEC). Businesses participating in social business create and manage information on social collaboration tools (social computing) and then use it on a regular basis. Social Collaboration is the activity of using social technology to support work processes.
Slack
At its core, Slack is a team communication tool, a robust chat room. And it’s taken on a multi-dimensional role for thousands of teams. (We’re Hipchat fans at Buffer, too, and appreciate the many uses we get from the tool.)
One of these roles is as a link sharing/collecting hub. Teammates drop fun and interesting links into one of the chat rooms for others to check out. It can be a great way to bubble up great content to fill the company’s social profiles.
Point
One of the coolest article sharing tools I’ve come across lately is Point, a chrome extension that lets you share stories with your team from any page you’re on.
With the extension installed, you can type the “@” key on any page you’re visiting, and this brings up a simple sharing box where you can add notes and send to different people on the team. Also, you can highlight parts of the article you share, and you can find all your history of shared links easily in the Point popover.
Trello
Trello is a favorite remote work tool of the Buffer team. We use it for organizing blog post ideas, Buffer bugs, team task forces, projects, and so much more.
Another cool use case is as a social media content board.
Wrike
A full-featured social media management app, Wrike helps organize campaigns and projects, assign tasks, share ideas, and followup on progress. The dashboards support huge teams like PayPal and AT&T and also provide free plans for teams of 5 or fewer.
Google Drive
Another favorite of social media teams is Google Drive, where you can collaborate together, live, on the same documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Some popular docs you might choose to share:
- Archive of your social media posts
- Spreadsheet of your social media stats
- Social media audit
- Document with your brand’s voice and tone
At Buffer, we find ourselves working together on social media specs and ideas in Hackpad, a stripped-down alternative to Google Drive.
Post Planner
Post Planner helps you find the best posts to share on Facebook, with a research-backed recommendation engine and a full image library, not to mention a queue schedule and the ability to work together with teammates.
Plans start at $7/month, or $15/month and up if you’re interested in collaborating with one or more teammates.
Tweetdeck teams
This Twitter management tool (the official one from Twitter) now lets you invite contributors and admins to share to your Twitter account for you, via Tweetdeck. You invite as many team members as you’d like and manage their roles as admins or contributors.
monday.com
monday.com is one of the market’s leading collaboration platforms for teams who need an all-in-one digital workspace. Ideal for managing all your work from sales pipelines to project and portfolio management, monday.com syncs all information in a single, accessible location, and empowers agents and team members to make better data-driven decisions. Thanks to its agility and breadth, monday.com is the leading solution in our project management software category, and winner of our Supreme Software, Expert’s Choice, and Great User Experience Award.
monday.com’s key field of action is streamlining workflows, and helping teams and departments stay aligned. Plus, the platform helps analyze and display work in a logical, intuitive way, so it’s easy for all team members to keep track of projects statuses. Meanwhile, monday.com makes sure everyone knows which tasks and assignments for which he/she is responsible at any given time.
monday.com boasts an intuitive, user-friendly interface, so you can onboard your team quickly without hours of training. However, if you’d like to learn more about monday’s advanced capabilities, you can find loads of training materials on their website and YouTube channel.
One of monday.com’s unique advantages is its customizable automations. Whether you need to notify your team of a status update or move tasks along a workflow, you can do it on monday.com. There are systems built into the software to make sure there will be no manual entry errors, so you can stop worrying about repetitive tasks, and focus on work that really drives growth.
FinancesOnline appreciates the collaborative features the platform offers. If you work in a team, monday.com makes it easy to to assign tasks, update statuses, and track progress for all open projects. Instead of searching through long email threads, you’ll be able to communicate next to the relevant task directly on the platform. So, you can easily search for items when you need them.
Furthermore, as a communication hub, monday.com acts as the central place to integrate your other key communication channels such as Slack, Zoom, email and Microsoft Teams. The platform integrates with more than 30 of your favorite tools. So, your team can share files, feedback, and ideas, while helping you assign tasks, get progress updates and generally have a big picture of everyone’s activities all in a consolidated location.
To make matters even better, monday.com is well-connected with leading apps of its kind, reasonably priced (prices start at $8/seat per month, billed monthly or annually), and equipped with powerful searching capabilities and unlimited storage. As your business grows and expands, monday.com will make it painless to shift to a premium version (Standard, Pro, or Enterprise), and acquire some of the platform’s premium features, VIP priority support, user permissions, and tailored onboarding. You can also purchase packages for more users. For those who would like to give the platform a test-drive prior to their purchase, there is a 14-day free trial available no credit card required.
Bridge24
Bridge24 is an extension that seamlessly integrates with project management software Asana, Basecamp, Trello, and AceProject. With its set of operational and professional reporting and exporting features, it lets you access, organize, filter, and export your data so that you can visualize it and extract valuable insights on your project.
Anyone or any team that needs to produce reports and charts from Trello, Asana, Basecamp, and AceProject can benefit from the enhanced reporting and exporting tools of Bridge24. If you’re a project manager, for example, Bridge24 can make it easier to prepare your monthly progress reports. If your team needs an effective way to monitor assigned tasks and backlogs, the software can produce a visual display of your team’s workflow so it’s easier to see the status of a task or identify where issues lie.
Bridge24 offers an array of viewing options, such as a power grid view, calendar view, and board view so you can get a clear picture of where each task is exactly in your pipeline. It has additional features like custom filters, task editing, and data grouping/sorting that are all indispensable when it comes to drilling down into tasks within projects.
Benefits of social collaboration
Bloomfire, a company that specializes in social collaboration software, identified five key benefits of social collaboration. They are:
- Increased understanding of projects throughout the organization. When employees are siloed, they know only what they are working on. Socializing their work helps ensure more employees are aware of the bigger picture.
- Easier knowledge transfer. When someone leaves an organization, knowledge typically leaves with them. Making their knowledge available to others in a public way minimizes the impact of their departure.
- Stronger teams. Teams that communicate well do better than those that don’t. If you don’t believe this, watch a development organization that has institutionalized code review, in which one developer consistently reviews the code of another. Both developers improve through the process, thereby improving the team.
- A better product. The more that employees socialize their work through collaboration, the better the opportunity for enhancements, and the better they are able to mitigate potential risks. Personally, I never send out something I’ve written for work without having a colleague review it. Including this article.
- Improved culture. When people on a team support each other through collaboration, there is less fear of failure because every project is a group project. If you’ve ever been in a team culture, you know what I’m talking about. It’s liberating and empowering at the same time.
Conclusion
Each individual and business uses social collaboration tools to find and share information and documents quickly and easily. Large organizations can centralize their stored information, media, and documents – then access it anytime – from anywhere – using any device – that’s how business works today.