Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D. and Eric Mattson through the Center for Marketing Research at The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth recently published a study titled, The Fortune 500 and Social Media: A Longitudinal Study of Blogging and Twitter Usage by America's Largest Corporations. I've reviewed the study, and it contains many findings worth sharing about the 2009 Fortune 500's use of social media:
I. 22% of the Fortune 500 have a Public-Facing Blog
* Represents 108 companies
* Shows a 6% growth relative to 2008 (81 companies)
* Firms in computer software, peripherals, and office equipment had the most blogs in 2009 (e.g., 11 companies) and included firms like H-P, Dell, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, and Xerox
* Blogging almost doubled in the specialty retail category (i.e., Home Depot, Best Buy, Toys "R" Us) from 4 blogs in 2008 to 7 in 2009
II. The Inc. 500 has Adopted Blogging 2x Faster than the Fortune 500
* 45% of The Inc. 500 have a blog. This is not surprising since the Inc. 500 represents entrepreneurial, fast-growing, private companies in the US
* The Inc. 500 doesn't have marketing budgets to support costly media campaigns (i.e., Super Bowl ads, regular television campaigns)
* The study points out that the difference may be due to "corporate philosophy regarding open communication with its stakeholders." I think there's a lot of truth to this point because the larger, established companies are concerned with "losing control" of their corporate message.
III. 35% of the Fortune 500 Use Twitter
* Represents 173 companies; The authors noted the growth of Twitter as "explosive"
* The insurance industry had the most Twitter accounts in 2009 (e.g., 13 companies); I find this very interesting and will have to do some self-research on how this industry is using Twitter
* The researchers deemed Twitter interactivity as having "consistent interactions with other users and on-going discussions that are easy to follow"
* A measure of the interactivity — 69% of the companies consistently responded with @replies or retweets (i.e., RTs) in the past 30 days
IV. The Fortune 500 are Integrating Other Social Media with Their Blogs
* 86% of the corporate blogs are linked to a corporate Twitter account
* 19% incorporate podcasts; 31% use video on their blog sites
* This usage represents increases in comparison to 2008 (i.e., 16% for podcasting and 21% for video)
* Shows an attempt to integrate different social media efforts
Conclusions — The Positive
* Shows there is a continued and steady adoption of social media by the largest US corporations
* The Fortune 500 participating in social media is a big step because these organizations achieved their success through traditional "outbound marketing" such as traditional print and television advertising campaigns (with maybe the exception of Google)
Conclusions — Lots of Room for Improvement
* There is still a long way to go – the other way to interpret the data is that 78% of the Fortune 500 do not blog and 65% do not use Twitter
* This blog post by Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross titled The Fortune 500 and Social Media presents a similar view of this conclusion and a review of the same study
Additional and Related Resources
* A previous blog post titled: 5 Insights from Hubspot's The State of Inbound Marketing 2010 Webinar
* HubSpot's State of Inbound Marketing 2010 Report (in PDF)
* Hubspot's Webinar Slides on State of Inbound Marketing 2010: I've embedded them here