Here is another very useful report from Nora Ganim Barnes and Ava M. Lescault of The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. I have written about Nora’s studies on many occasions (see for example this report on Social Media and Fortune 500). The longitudinal aspect of them makes them very useful. The last report I covered here was on the Inc 500. In this case they looked at the big firms, the Fortune 500. The subtitle headlines the findings as LinkedIn Dominates As Use of Newer Tools Explodes. The highlights include the following.
In 2014, 157 companies (31%) had corporate blogs showing a decrease of 3% in use of this tool in the past year. While some firms are moving to newer tools I still think that blogs offer the best chance to provide a substantive message. As Nora noted, “adoption (in 2012-13) of this mature social media tool by these great companies seemed to signal the return of the online in depth conversation, thought leadership and original content development that was popular a decade ago with early corporate adopters of blogging like IBM and Ford Motors.” Now it is dropping a small bit again.
Within the Fortune 500 413 companies (83%) have corporate Twitter accounts with a tweet in the past thirty days. This represents a 6% increase since 2013. Facebook, in its second year on the Fortune 500 list, has the highest number of followers on Twitter with over 13 million, followed by Starbucks (6.3 million), Microsoft (4.2 million), Walt Disney Company, Whole Foods Market,Inc., Nike,Inc., and Intel Corporation. They also have the most Facebook fans along with Coca-Cola, The Walt Disney Company and Starbucks. Eighty percent of the Fortune 500 are now on Facebook. This represents a 10% increase since 2013.
Looking at the newer tools, in the past year, Foursquare enjoyed the largest increase in adoption (42%), while Pinterest use increased by 27% and Instagram by 12%. Within the Fortune 500 97% have a corporate presence on LinkedIn. This adoption exceeds that of the Inc. 500 where 88% of companies have LinkedIn company pages. There is much more in the report and I encourage your to check it out at their site, see: The 2014 Fortune 500 and Social Media: LinkedIn Dominates As Use of Newer Tools Explodes.