Stats On Social Media Activity

Temkin Group and Peppers & Rogers Group teamed up to survey companies about their social media efforts. Check out this Peppers & Rogers article with interesting findings from the research: How Does Your Social Strategy Stack Up?

In this post, I’m examining data from the 68 respondents from companies with annual revenues of $100 million or more. I put together five slides with data that I felt was interesting. Here are some of the highlights:

• Only 21% of respondents have connected social media into their operations while 26% are doing very little about social media at all.
• The top obstacle they identify is connecting social media efforts to hard-dollar returns.
• Only 6% of respondent think they’ve achieved significant business results from social media and 20% have seen very little benefit.  But many are still hopeful; 38% expect to gain significant benefits within three years.
• The benefit that is most frequently measured is an increase in engagement, using metrics like time on site or number of friends/fans.
• Social media is led by a functional leader in 44% of firms and by a social media leader in 21%.
• Marketing “owns” more than half of the social media efforts. But 62% are using social media for something in customer service.
• The top three social media activities are: providing links to relevant content, providing reactive support when customers complain, and integrating social media marketing with other marketing channels.
• Nearly 60% of  companies encourage some employees to use social media, while 25% encourage all employees to use it. But all of that social media might be problematic; only 60% have social media guidelines and in place and only about 40% provide social media training to employees.

The bottom line: Companies have not yet mastered social media