Are Fortune 500 companies letting the social media world pass them by? According to this post which cites statistics from the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, a solid majority of the country’s largest firms have been slow to adopt a visible social media presence.
The statistics are surprising, but the social slacking may not be where you think. For example, 23% of Fortune 500 companies had public blogs in 2010. That percentage was unchanged for 2011. However, the Fortune 100 companies (or the top 20% of the Fortune 500) engage on both blogs and Twitter at the highest level of the 500. For example, 35% of the top 100 had a blog and 25% had a Twitter account in 2011.
So what does this mean for social recruiting at the largest companies in the country? Our experience – and our survey data – show that the biggest companies are indeed the most active users of social recruiting. In our recent survey tracking ROI of Social Media in the Enterprise we found that 72% of firms surveyed were actively engaged in social recruiting and 69% plan to increase their social media budgets in 2012. Perhaps not surprisingly, our survey focused on large US firms with 3,000 or more employees and several of our Fortune 100 clients were among them. While social networking started out as the great democratizing tool for the little guy, big firms have clearly started to get serious about social strategy. And it’s just the beginning!
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