The study, “Social Media Use by Fortune 100 Companies,” showed that 54 percent of these companies had a Twitter presence in July, while 32 percent had a corporate blog and 29 percent had a Facebook fan page.
The vast majority, or 94 percent, of Twitter-using companies used the social network for news and announcements, while 67 percent used it for customer service, 57 percent used it for promotions and deals and 11 percent used it for job postings.
Meanwhile, 21 percent of the surveyed companies are using just one of the three social media channels discussed. Of this group, 76 percent were likely to use Twitter, 14 percent were likely to use Facebook and 10 percent were likely to maintain a blog.
Forty percent are not using Twitter, Facebook or a corporate blog, while 17 percent are active on all three and 22 percent are active on two of them. Of companies using two of the three outlets, 64 percent were likely to use a Twitter account in addition to a blog.
This is another piece of good news for Twitter with regards to its marketing viability. A few weeks ago, Email Data Source revealed that Twitter is the most linked-to social networking site in e-mail marketing campaigns.
During the first six months of 2009, Twitter had been linked to in 41,399 e-mail campaigns, according to Email Data Source, while Facebook had been linked to in 41,052 campaigns.
However, after sifting through 2,000 tweets during a period of two weeks, researchers at Pear Analytics have found that 40.55 percent of tweets were “pointless babble,” 37.55 percent were “conversational,” 8.7 percent were re-tweets, 5.85 percent were based on self-promotion and 3.75 percent were spam. News accounted for just 3.6 percent of the tweets analyzed.
According to these results, Twitter remains relatively unscathed by spam compared to e-mail, but it’s clear that there is a lot of noise to overcome for companies hoping to establish tweet-based strongholds online. Facebook has noise, too, mostly in the form of annoying applications and notifications, but fan pages are relatively noise-free.
The best course of action, of course, seems to be a multi-pronged approach that utilizes as many channels of effective social networking as possible.
Sources:</strong
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007229
http://www.prweekus.com/Twitter-tops-social-media-for-Fortune-100-companies/article/141101/
http://www.businessinsider.com/40-of-tweets-are-pointless-babble-8-have-news-interest-2009-8
http://clients.freelancewebdesigner.com/jw/20110620-dmctest/blogs/category/Social_Networks/2358/
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