Social
Media Measurement
3rd
Annual UMass
Dartmouth
Survey of Social Media Usage
Center
for Marketing Research study finds that everyone's in a conversation,
all are happy,
but no one can prove any of it.
by Katie
Delahaye Paine
There's
something so powerful about the number three. Every gardener
knows that you always buy or plant three of anything if you want
your arrangement
to look "right."
Then there's the three example rule for almost every
story, joke, or argument.
And then
there's the third year in a longitudinal study.
For each
of the past three years, Dr.
Nora Ganim Barnes, Director, UMD Center for Marketing Research,
UMass Dartmouth, has conducted research on social media
usage in the
Fortune
500, Inc. 500, higher education, and non-profit worlds.
Dr. Barnes
presented her latest research findings at SNCR's
annual Symposium and Awards Gala earlier this month. (The full
studies will be available on www.sncr.org.)
This year's fascinating results prove another gardening maxim based
on
the number three: "A
year to peep, a year to creep, and a year to leap!" (For
more research presented at this year's SNCR Symposium, see "The
Value of Lurkers in Social Media Communities.")
Results
from the
first year of the research, 2007, were interesting. Something
above a "So
what?" but
hardly earth-shattering. Results
from the second year were intriguing,
as we could
see numbers
shifting and Twitter beginning to have
influence. (The
2008 non-profit study results are here.)
And this year's results are downright
knock-your-socks-off stuff.
Here are the highlights:
- 91%
of the fastest growing American companies (the Inc. 500) are now
using some form of social media. (But non-profits and higher
education are light years ahead of the Fortune
500 and the
Inc. 500 in using and benefiting from social media.)
- Use
of every form of social media has doubled.
- The
number of organizations saying they don't use social media
at all has dropped
from 43% to 23%.
- Almost
everyone (better than 85% in every category) believes that their
social
media programs have
been successful.
- When
asked how they measured success, the vast majority either
aren't measuring or don't know how. Amazingly,
40% of higher education organizations, Inc 500, and Fortune
500 companies say that they are not monitoring
their brand, products, or company name in social media.
- Use
of blogs comparison:
- Non-profits:
57%
- Higher
education: 41%
- Ink
500: 39%
- Fortune
500: 16%
Results
for the Fortune 500
The Fortune
500 lagged the three other groups in social media usage:
- The
higher up a company ranked in the Fortune 500, the more
likely they were to blog.
- Only
23 Fortune 500 blogs had links to Twitter accounts.
Results
for the Inc. 500
- 44%
say that social media is a very important component of their
marketing strategy.
- They
tend to measure hits and page views. A few are gauging customer
satisfaction by lead
generation and word of
mouth.
Results
for higher
education
To measure
social media use in higher education, Barnes' team
conducted a telephone survey of 536 randomly selected U.S. universities,
70% private and
30% public. Results:
- Usage
is a bit of everything: 41% blog, 61% use social
networks (e.g., Facebook or Twitter),
36% use bulletin boards or message boards, 48% use video, 10%
use wikis.
- Like
the Inc. 500, they all think it's successful, and they measure
that success by counting hits, comments, word of mouth,
and enrollment.
- The
number of institutions who do not allow comments on their blogs declined from 36% in 2007 to 22% in
2009. So, it does
seem they're getting smarter about social media.
Results
for non-profit organizations
- 79% are
using video, 79% are using social networks, 57% are blogging, 36%
are podcasting
and only 11% don't use any social media at all.
- 83%
believe these efforts are successful, as measured by
the number of comments, hits, and donations.
- A sizeable
proportion don't measure
at all.
- Non-profits
believe that social media is important: Only 17% say it's not
important, while 45% say it's very important and another 35% say
it's somewhat important.
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