By Nick Johnson - February 29th, 2012
Hi all, In the run-up to the release of the 'State of Corporate Social Media 2012' briefing (get your advance copy here), I'm writing a series of blog posts based on some of the findings from ou...
Hi all,
In the run-up to the release of the 'State of Corporate Social Media 2012' briefing (get your advance copy here), I'm writing a series of blog posts based on some of the findings from our research.
This is the third (first and second are here and here), and this week I'll be looking into social media staffing - and how many people work exclusively on social media for large companies.
First off, some pretty charts:
TOP five CONCLUSIONS
1 The first thing to point out is that this is the first of three questions - the second and third asking about people within a company working on social media as part of their role, or simply off their own back. That's important - the figures shift wildly when you take those guys into account.
2 The second point to make is that on average, most companies do have at least one person working on social media - 56% of respondents said they had one or more person doing this exclusively. In fact, a third of companies have 2 or more people working on this stuff as their sole role.
3 When we go a little deeper into the statistics, we can see that, as one would expect, the USA still appears to be leading Europe when it comes to social media adoption within business. Whereas 60% of US-based companies have at least one member of staff working on social, the figure drops to 50% for Europeans.
4 When you compare B2B and B2C businesses, the divide is even more radical. Only 48% of B2B companies have someone working exclusively on social. And yet 69% of B2C companies admit to this. When you look further, you can see that while 18% of B2C companies have 4 or more members of staff working exclusively on social media, only 7% of B2B companies can say the same.
As several other results from the survey suggest, perhaps this is because B2B companies - out of neccessity - need a far more embedded and holistic social media strategy? As you'll see if you get the full briefing, B2B social media teams do not seem to be dominated by marketers - but are spread far more evenly across various different departments. Perhaps the charts above back that up - in that while they do not have one strong central social media department (that - as things stand - tend to be focused on marketing), they do have many people around the business who are responsible for engaging in social as part of their role.
5 When you compare these figures to our 2011 Briefing, you'll see that very little has changed.59% of companies had one member of staff working exclusively on social a year ago - and this year the figure stands at 56%. I wouldn't take this slight drop as proof that social media is dropping off the corporate radar, by the way. I think it would be more sensible to attribute it to statistical error. But what you can do is see that - even accounting for errors - not much has changed.
Does this show that 2011 was a year of consolidation for social?
Is that your experience? Or was 2011 a hiring frenzy?
It would be great to know your thoughts - let us know in the comments!
And if you'd like to sign up to receive an advance copy of the State of Corporate Social Media 2012 briefing, just head here.