Social Blogging

Do top US corporations use social media? Is the business world leveraging new media technologies to engage customers? The answer is definitely positive according to a new research study on 2009 Fortune 500 companies and their use of social media tools, like blogs and Twitter and authored by Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson.

Photo credit: Kheng Ho Toh and Dmitriy Shironosov

Each year Fortune Magazine compiles a list of the largest US corporations, which are named the Fortune 500 given their size and wealth. Due to the hugely influential role that these companies play in the corporate world, studying their use of new media technologies offers valuable insights into the future of social media communication technologies and approaches.

That is why every year, Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson take Fortune 500 companies as a testing ground to analyze the use of blogs and Twitter inside the corporate world.

In their latest report, published here, these are their reported highlights:

• Corporate blog use is steadily increasing, especially among the lower-ranked group of Fortune 500 corporations.
• All higher-ranked corporations have a Twitter account, as well as almost all other companies in the lower positions of the Fortune 500 list
• 86% of the 108 corporate blogs examined are linked to a Twitter account
• All 173 corporate Twitter accounts analyzed were active with replies and retweets in the past 30 days, showing a persistent interaction with other users.
• Podcasting and videos gained momentum among Fortune 500 companies.

What emerges from this research is the steady adoption of blogs and the explosive growth of Twitter among Fortune 500 companies, which emphasizes the increasing importance of social media inside the business world.

Specifically, this report suggests that Fortune 500 companies leverage social media technologies like blogs and Twitter as a mean to:

• Improve their communications approach,
• build internal knowledge,
• improve marketing and sales,
• guarantee long-term sustainability and growth.

Given that Fortune 500 companies stand as an established model for business success, it is indeed strategically critical for you to examine the data inside this report and extract valuable, solid insights that may help you develop an effective social media marketing strategy.