Top 7 Enterprise Social Networks

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In light of Facebook’s new enterprise social network (ESN), Facebook at Work, launching in the app store (but only downloadable by a few key partners at this time) we thought it was a good time to review a few of the other top ESNs on the market.

Now if your company has never considered implementing an enterprise social network you may be thinking, “Why would we go through the hassle of setting this up, how will it help the company?” Well, let me tell you.

What are Enterprise Social Networks?

Enterprise social network is basically just a fancy term for “social networking for businesses”. While ESNs are generally thought of as an internal corporate collaboration tool, the application of a standard social networking platform is also used by the enterprise to communicate with the public.

Benefits of Enterprise Social Networks:

• Give employees a voice, allows equal playing field for discussion
• Collaboration, making it easy to connect on projects and tasks
• Cuts down on email inbox clutter, searchable organized and targeted messaging
• Privacy, secure conversations and file sharing for nearly any file type and size
• Easily update the whole company or specific groups on company news
• Recognize employees good work

While there are hundreds of ENSs out there, we wanted to highlight what are considered the top 7: Yammer, Slack, Convo, Jostle, Chatter, HighQ, and Bitrix24.

Pricing:

Pricing models differ across these platforms and for many unlimited enterprise packages one needs to contact a sales representative at the ESN, but many offer free packages for smaller companies. For instance, Convo is free for 20 or less employees and then for up to 150 employees it costs $9 per user/month. While four of them use this per user/month pricing a few have flat rates for company size like HighQ, which is $18 per month with a minimum of 50 employees.

Unique Features:

A few of these platforms really stood out in our research as having some unique and highly applicable qualities, such as:

• Slack – premium versions allow companies to integrate and even build custom apps for the platform
• Convo – using a highlighting tool users can highlight parts of an image and discuss it in a related thread.
• Jostle & Chatter – these platforms both incorporated a polling tool, making it easy to get a groups opinion and save the data if needed.

If you are in the market for an ESN we hope this helped you narrow things down. If you weren’t in the market before, get on it! Increased productivity and collaboration await!

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