Business.com recently released their 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study and we found some of the results surprising!

To put the findings into proper perspective, key demographics of respondents include:

  • 60% of respondents had less than 10 employees, and the vast majority had less than 4 employees.
  • 58% hold C-level titles (i.e. CEO, CFO, President).
  • 48% sell services only
  • 63% are B2C and 24% are B2B; 63% also report more than 2/3 of their revenue comes from local customers

Moving onto key findings from the study and our reaction to them:

  1. Nearly 65% of respondents use social media as part of their normal work routine, and common activities include reading blogs, visiting business profiles on sites like Facebook or LinkedIn or using Twitter to find information and/or communicate about business-related matters.  We were surprised that only 65% of respondents use social media for business, as close to 100% of business people we meet use at least LinkedIn.
  2. The average company is currently planning, developing, or running seven different social media initiatives.  25.7% of companies are working on 10 initiatives or more.  The demographics of the study indicate that the majority of respondents are micro or small businesses, yet the average responding company is working on seven different social media initiatives.  I guess it’s all in the definition of “social media initiative.”
  3. 51% of people spend 10 – 29% of their weekly work time on social media activities for business. Using an average 45-hour week, this is anywhere from half a day to one and a half days.  Yes, social media takes time and commitment.  But, spending one and a half days per week seems excessive, especially when considering the value of time.
  4. The average company in this study used four different success metrics to judge social media, with most popular being web site traffic.  What surprised us here was the popularity rank of the identified metrics and that there seemed to be a contrary relationship between identified metrics and accessibility of information needed to measure a particular point.  As an example, ‘useful product feedback’ was the lowest identified success metric at 23% but the second highest (55%) in terms of accessing the data to measure its impact on social media.
  5. On average, users in retail, marketing, law, financial services and Internet industry are less likely to use social media as a business information resource. We were very surprised that the marketing and Internet industry were less likely than industries like construction and automotive to use social media as a resource.
  6. YouTube is the leading business content sharing site, used by 65% of content sharers.  We weren’t really surprised by this statistic, we just found it interesting.

How does your business stack up to this study?  Did any of the findings surprise you?  What are your most common social media activities?  How do you track your time spent and measure results? 

If you would like to download and read the full report, please visit: http://www.business.com/info/business-social-media-benchmark-study.

[Image courtesy of  iprole]