Sharing and socialising

Social media is rapidly moving closer and closer to the heart of corporate and investor communications. One recent survey found that 84 of Fortune’s Global 100 companies now participate on at least one social media platform. For these companies, Twitter usage is up by 18% over the year; YouTube by 14% and Facebook by 13%.

More importantly, the average number of followers per corporate Twitter account is also up – by a staggering 241%: in February 2010, the figure was 1,489; today it is 5,076. It’s clear that the social media audience for corporate information is still growing hugely – while 16% of companies in the Global 100 are still failing to engage at all. However, across the corporate sphere there are many companies that have been experimenting with social media. Some haven’t liked what they’ve found – Strabag, the Austrian construction company, shut down its Twitter account earlier this month, citing a lack of relevant stakeholder engagement. Many other companies are presumably ploughing on, convinced of the need to engage but uncertain as to how to go about it.

What is clear is that companies need to establish better highways between the corporate website and the social networks. The corporate site is the only online source that a company controls directly – and this, understandably, is where the company would wish most of its audience would come for information. Yet given that the audience spends the majority of its time out on the networks, companies have no real choice but to engage with their audience on the networks and then, if possible, direct them back to the corporate site. At the same time, the corporate site should offer clear signposting back to the social networks – nothing is more off-putting than a dead end.

One of the best ways that companies can engage on the networks is by providing valuable, dynamic content that can be analysed, discussed and, most importantly, shared with others. Companies already go to considerable lengths to ensure that this sort of content is available on their corporate websites. What they now need to do is to make sure that it can be easily disseminated.

To help address this issue, we are building social media “Share-It” and “Embed” options into all of our new tools and services, including our charts and other interactive technologies. For example, all of our new ShareMonitor charts, like the one recently deployed by BASF, now come with Share-It and Embed options so users can link them to Facebook, Twitter and other sites or embed them in their own websites or blogs. Our entry-level Data Charting Tool Express also has this feature, as noted by IR Web Report.

While this allows the corp comms team to seed interesting, interactive data out on the social networks, the ultimate goal is to find a way to drive tweeters and facebookers to the website to find information that most appeals to them – and to share it among their own followers. This can only be done by spending yet more time out on the social networks which brings fresh challenges but greater rewards. Eventually there should be a constant flow of traffic – a virtuous social media circle – travelling in both directions between the social networks and the corporate site. But perhaps that’s best left for another blog post.

Posted by Marcus

[Image: Creative Commons License / © Jared Tarbell]

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