Socialbakers Engage is one of the best social media marketing conferences in the world, let alone the UK.  With expert speakers from Socialbakers as well as from large companies who are winning at social, this was one conference we could not turn down the invitation to.  Below you can find our roundup of the days key insights.

The Social Layer: Jan Rezab spoke about the role of social media developing into a layer over all media types, rather than simply being seen as a subset of digital.  This applies to advertising, customer care, and content as social is a people to people medium that will continue to grow and spread across all media types.

Aiming to be Socially Native: Socialbakers also set a new target for brands to aim at – becoming a socially native business.  This is the ultimate step in social media sophistication within a business, where social is totally integrated into the business, all staff are aware and involved and optimization and analysis is at a high level with automation involved.  It is estimated that less than 1% of businesses are at this level, and this is something to strive for in your social media efforts.

Social Advertising: Another key theme and insight from the day was around social advertising.  Whilst native social advertising is key and hugely important, there was a lot of discussion about how the majority of digital ads will be social in the coming years.  With Google releasing G+ ads into their display network, Twitter and Facebook growing, and other channels emerging, the role of social in advertising is only going to grow.  This is because a well targeted ad is even more relevant with social recommendations alongside, giving more power and a higher CTR.

Customer Care: the important of social customer care was once again emphasised, with KLM, the leading brand in social customer care (according to Socialbakers Socially Devoted surveys) talking through how they manage their process to deliver the best customer care available.  This provides a positive impression of the brand amongst customers and taking care of customers and managing response rate and response time across Facebook and Twitter is crucially important.  Having a dedicated team and a set workflow process is required for this kind of customer care at scale.