Business.com's 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study

2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study
2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study  The interesting question about business use of social media is rapidly shifting from one of adoption - whether companies actually using various social media channels to build brands, promote products or services, engage with customers and more - to one of utilization focused on understanding how businesses, and business people, are taking advantage of these new media. Mounting research, including the fact that 46% of US adults now 1 participate in social networks, and a quarter do so weekly , make it increasingly difficult to pigeon-hole social media as something relevant to only specific demographic groups or T
personal vs. work lives. Social media is here to stay, and marketers need all the help they can get understanding this new communication channel. R
Business.com's 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study was designed to assess current trends in the use of social media in North American businesses. Based on O
2,948 valid responses to our online Business Social Media Benchmarking Survey during August and early September, 2009, the results provide a very useful benchmark for where P
businesses, and business people, are finding value in social media across different activities and sites. The study was focused on social media utilization - how people and companies E
are using social media in a work context today - and not on adoption. All study participants currently used social media in their day-to-day jobs as a resource for business-relevant R
information and/or worked for a company currently managing, developing or planning social media initiatives. This report is organized into two sections. The first covers how business people utilize social H
media today to find business-relevant information, similar to how they might use search engines or talk with peers and colleagues. This is clearly an area of particular interest to C
business-to-business (B2B) marketers but establishing clear benchmarks in this area has much larger ramifications at a time where, according to a recent study by Robert Half 2International , 54% of companies ban two of the most popular social media sites for business, R
Facebook and Twitter and only 10% of the 1,400 CIOs surveyed indicated that they give employees full access to social networks at work. This knee-jerk concern about squandering A
work time on personal issues has been seen many times before (telephones, cell phones, Internet, e-mail, etc.) and establishing the business value in social media can help companies E
placing themselves in the position of attempting to understand and utilize this new communication channel without the ability to actually use it at work. S
The second section covers corporate social media initiatives, benchmarking experience with E
social media for business (both respondent and company), top social media activities and how companies judge social media success today. We also took a more in-depth look at five R
areas of business social media activity - business profiles on social media sites, participating in question-and-answer sites/forums (Q&A), social media monitoring, content sharing and initiatives on business results and how likely respondents are to recommend using specific sites for business purposes to a friend or colleague (the Net Promoter Score, a loyalty metric originally developed by Satmetrix, Bain & Company, and Fred Reichheld). Share this study: 1Lenhart, Amanda. The Democratization of Online Social Networks. Pew Internet & American Life Project, October 8, 2009, http://www.pewinternet.org/Presentations/2009/41--The-Democratization-of-Online-Social-Networks.aspx. 2 Gaudin, Sharon. Study: 54% of Companies Ban Facebook, Twitter at Work. October 6, 2009. Computerworld. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139020/Study_54_of_companies_ban_Facebook_Twitter_at_work
© 2009 Business.com, Inc . All Rights Reserved. 1 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study
This report is primarily focused on reporting clean, high-level results from our Business Social Media Benchmarking Survey. We will provide deeper analysis on a number of topics in future reports but also invite you, the reader, to share your own interpretation of the results you s... [download for more]