Business.com Social Media Survey – Are You Running 7 Social Media Campaigns?
Business.com just released the results of a study on social media usage by business professionals. The big data points that stuck out for me:
- The average company in this study was planning, developing or running seven(!!!!) different social media initiatives
- Facebook is the social media platform of choice for the majority of respondents, but I suspect that most are not using it for business reasons.
Here are the high level findings:
- Webinars and podcasts are top social media resources for business professionals, used by 69% of those who turn to social media channels for business information. Time to launch my webinar business!
- Facebook is the dominant social network on which consumer-focused companies maintain one or more profiles, cited by 83% of respondents versus 45% for Twitter.
You can’t play Farmville on Twitter…yet - Business-to-business (B2B) companies, however, maintain a presence on both platforms with 77% maintaining a profile on Facebook and 73% on Twitter. For a number of reasons I feel like Twitter is just a better business platform than FB and this kind of suggests that
- Current trends to restrict access to social networks like Facebook or Twitter at work need to be re-thought in light of the business value in such activity.
- Among respondents using social media for business purposes in their day-to-day jobs, 62% visit company or brand profiles on social networking sites and 55% search for business information on these sites.
Of course since business is like gambling, searching for Texas Hold ‘Em Poker on Facebook can be classified as searching for business information.
- Among respondents using social media for business purposes in their day-to-day jobs, 62% visit company or brand profiles on social networking sites and 55% search for business information on these sites.
- Consultants and marketing communications professionals are the most active users of social media as a resource for business information, particularly in micro (<10 employees) and small businesses (10-99 employees). IT professionals have the lowest participation rate IT pros always know better right?
- Both companies and employees are scaling a massive learning curve with social media.
- The average company in this study was planning, developing or running seven different social media initiatives; 65% of respondents staffing those initiatives, and 71% of companies themselves, have less than two years of experience with social media for business.
I just don’t believe this stat – or else they asked the question so that sending emails to customers counted as a social media initiative, etc.
- The average company in this study was planning, developing or running seven different social media initiatives; 65% of respondents staffing those initiatives, and 71% of companies themselves, have less than two years of experience with social media for business.
- Building brand awareness and brand reputation are two of the top social media success metrics, but nearly two-thirds of companies focused on these metrics have little to no insight into performance via standard or easily accessible reports.
And that is why there is a big business in managing online reputations for SMBs and providing easy to understand ROI metrics on all online marketing initiatives.
Get the full study here
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