Three enterprise app providers that are leveraging social media

Let’s face it. Social media has become an integral part of everyday life, enabling near-instant communication and updates with friends located around the globe. The ease at which people can quickly pick up and learn social media apps like Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter has not gone unnoticed by the enterprise software community, and businesses have discovered that replicating the usability of social media platforms in the office can have significant productivity benefits. In fact, a recent Forrester survey of IT and business leaders found that 95 percent of respondents believe that employee productivity and efficiency will increase with a modernized approach to enterprise applications. Pair this industry shift with Facebook’s recent release of Workplace, which helps streamline internal communications and improve productivity, and it becomes abundantly clear that businesses are realizing that the popularity of social media apps is no accident.

A recent study by Dell and Intel found that 79 percent of millennial employees believe that the workplace is more collaborative than it used to be. This increased collaboration, in part, can be attributed to businesses adopting enterprise applications that replicate some of the aforementioned social media tactics. Is your business in need of an internal overhaul to improve employee productivity?

Here are three enterprise app providers leading the way by bringing social media qualities to the enterprise.

- Sapho

The Sapho Micro App Platform enables organizations to build secure ‘micro apps’, on top of existing enterprise systems, that provide employees proactive insights and one-click task completion from a work ‘feed’ available on any device. Akin to Facebook's News Feed, Sapho aggregates enterprise data into a single, personalized feed, helping employees prioritize tasks and information that are important to them or require their action. While Facebook’s algorithms help create a digestible timeline of events and posts from friends, Sapho’s algorithms prioritize urgent tasks and data from enterprise systems, ensuring employees don’t overlook (or fail to consider) relevant data buried within these complicated systems. With 65 percent of employees admitting to ignoring data when making business decisions if it is too hard to access, it is vital that companies take new experience and workflow approaches into consideration that make data both accessible and actionable.

- Vera

Vera is a data security company that takes a page out of Snapchat's playbook by enabling company administrators to send files and data that ‘disappear’ after a few hours or days. Similar to Snapchat’s lighthearted approach of sending images to friends, Vera is especially useful for companies seeking to reduce the risk of data theft when needing to share confidential documents or sensitive data. Vera also lets businesses keep track of where their data is in real-time, no matter how far it travels or how many hands (or devices) it touches. Snapchat users will find this type of content sharing and monitoring familiar, thanks to the social media platform’s ability to let the sender monitor when, or if, a friend has opened an image or video they shared.

- Chatter

Salesforce’s collaboration tool Chatter greatly resembles Twitter's live stream of posts and updates by allowing internal team members to share resources and give office-wide updates in real time. Whether collaborating about a company-wide sales presentation or informing the office that there are leftover cookies in the kitchen, Chatter is a social forum for the workplace. Beyond its Twitter-like capabilities, Chatter also has unique features like Topics, which presents the most up-to-date content on any subject discussed in the community by compiling relevant posts and answers via hashtags for easy searching and resource sharing. Both Chatter and Twitter allow users to upload content like photos or videos to posts, but Chatter also allows collaboration on business projects like marketing campaigns or sales opportunities to avoid the flood of email updates.

With platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter inundating our daily lives as consumers, it was inevitable that businesses would start looking into how to capitalize on features like news feeds and live updates that social media has taught us. The trend of enterprise applications integrating social media-like features seems destined to continue. However, the savviest businesses looking to transform their clunky enterprise applications into efficient powerhouses will not simply invest in applications resembling social media – they will implement applications that actually transform the way work is done.