Professional Documents
Culture Documents
MEDIA IN BELGIUM
AUGUST 2010
Mic Adam
Vanguard Leadership
The popularity of a number of social media platforms is just amazing and growth
seems to be never ending. There is always a new and fancy platform or
application being added. Last year it was Twitter (1.300% growth), this year it
seems to be geo-location with Foursquare being the leading player.
With that in mind, monitoring of what is being said about you as a company;
product or even person becomes a must. Companies will tell you they are
monitoring the conversation, but the reality is that even they, mostly the
marketers, do not always grasp how to do this.
Social media is about interaction, some call it engagement, with the customer. It
becomes a two-way conversation. Or that is what we are led to believe. Many
opportunities are left unanswered because either companies are not present in
social media or when present they do not respond or react.
To try and understand whether companies are present in social media and
listening, Vanguard Leadership has done a “Social Media Monitoring” study in
the Belgian market place. This report summarizes the findings.
There is a lot of hype around social media which makes it difficult for companies
to decide when to jump on the bandwagon or wait a while till some of this dust
settles down and then make a big entrance.
More and more companies are creating social media profiles but it is fair to say
that this is for a lot of companies not part of a well thought out strategy. It’s kind
of a getting their feet wet by sticking their toes into the water. There are 2 major
questions to be answered: know what to do with it and how does it fit in into the
business.
In order to get a sense of how well companies monitor social media, it is good to
also shed some light on the level that companies are visible in social media. That
is why this survey will look into 2 areas:
It is clear that this research will not catch all monitoring that is being done since a
lot of companies by means of individual accounts seem to be, at least that is what
marketers tell us, monitoring social media platforms. This research will not
address this type of monitoring or presence which is by nature anonymous and not
really traceable.
This research will not focus on social media types such as blogging, video, photo,
bookmarking and alike.
Company Analysis
The desk research and analysis was done by
Searches in most popular social media (Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin)
1. Do companies have a presence (profile) on social media?
2. Where do they have these profiles?
Visiting all website of the 540 companies looking for
1. Are they making these profiles visible on their website?
2. How easily can it be found?
The first hurdle is finding the links to the profiles on the website. Some
companies have them on the landing page while others hide them somewhere else
in areas such as “Contacts” or “Links”. Secondly, companies create or use not
easy to find back names especially in Twitter. It feels like they want to be
anonymous.
The research has used the term social media in the large sense of the word
including not only Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. but also items such as RSS
feeds.
Not Present
29%
Present
71%
All things being equal, this does not mean that companies have not started their
first steps in social media. It is highly likely that one or more of their employees
are getting their feet wet without being linked to the company.
Yes
25% Yes
35%
No
No 65%
75%
In terms of video platforms (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) and picture platforms (Flickr,
Picasa, etc.), the numbers are so small (under 10%) that they have not been
subject to detailed research this study.
It is fair to claim that business platforms such as LinkedIn are being embraced
more easily than social media that is considered personal (Facebook, Twitter,…).
We have to keep in mind that there is practice to block social media in companies
thus leading to a lesser presence of certain companies. From previous research
from various sources including our own (March 2010), we know that companies
tend to block certain social media for various reasons (time wasting, reputation
management, bandwidth, etc.). It goes as far as 50% of companies that block
access to social media. These media include but are not limited to Facebook,
Twitter and YouTube.
A fair comment on the last point being that some companies might be present but
under a name that is not easily related to the company name or business.
80%
60%
40%
20%
0%
Facebook Twitter LinkedIn
Social media monitoring is therefore one of the hot topics at this time. Though
companies claim they are listening to social media, there is limited research
available on what that actually means.
The first question that needs to be answered is what social media monitoring
really consists of. Here are 3 possible definitions or areas to consider for
companies:
Monitoring of what is being said about the company and its brands?
Monitoring for trends about the general business, competition, etc.?
Monitoring what employees are saying in social media?
Monitoring by itself is not enough; you also need to do something with it which is
the engagement piece and the true nature of a good social media strategy.
There are many tools available that do some kind of monitoring. They vary from
free tools and services over freemium accounts to payable services. However, the
technology and software application are still in an early stage of development
even though the software vendors will argue otherwise. One of the major missing
components is a good monitoring of LinkedIn activity. Put them to the test and
see what fits your needs and requirements! Keep in mind that you might need a
few different tools to have a complete picture.
The best way to see if companies monitor their social media is to contact them
directly on social media and see what kind of response you get. We have done
this on the 3 major social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. We
must admit that the latter has posed somewhat of a challenge and lead to some
creative thinking around this topic.
Twitter Replies
Reply
44%
No Reply
56%
There are two ways to look at this result. On the one hand, 56% do monitor and
respond to comments on their tweet wall. On the other hand, still 44% of the
companies that HAVE a Twitter account do NOT respond. As to the why for not
responding we can only guess the reasons.
About half the companies seem to have a Fan page on Facebook Of those who had a
page the statistics are shocking:
20% have a page but no fans and no comment – these pages were claimed
before some else stepped in but not used.
43% have a page with a few (under 25) followers and at least one post – no
promotion or visibility given (employees and family only).
19% have a page with some followers and a good amount of own posts – the
page is used as another form of cheap advertizing but no interaction allowed
or requested.
18% seem to be good examples that have interaction with their community.
Monitoring test: After having posted messages on the wall or created posts from
related friends (showing on the wall), the result of response is very disappointing.
Only a 4% response rate!
Facebook Presence
We decided to repeat the same experiment on Mic Adam’s network (over 1,400
people strong). During one week we solicited directly a comment or “LIKE” via
my status update. The message read: “SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING RESEARCH -
YOUR INPUT NEEDED: I am currently doing a major study on social media monitoring
and LinkedIn is part of it. If you have seen and read my status update please indicate so
by leaving me a comment/like. In a week's time I will report back with my results via my
status update.”
The result is very disappointing since we only got 4 reactions. We are convinced
his contacts have seen this message; but it has not inspired them to take part in the
experiment. We decided to repeat the experiment using a more interesting trigger,
namely a copy of this report before it gets published. The result here is similar,
namely 5 responses.
The average number of members in the group was 705 with the low extreme of 57
and the high extreme of 2.495 members.
Discussions in groups
1%
1%
5%
15%
No comment
1-5 comments
78%
6-20comments
21-50 comments
50+ comments
Answers
8% 1% 12%
No comment
35%
44% 1-5 comments
6-20comments
21-50 comments
50+ comments
Poll Participation
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
No 1 - 5 6 - 20 21 - 51 - 251 - 1000+
votes votes votes 50 250 1,000 votes
votes votes votes
Theoretically every polls should have at least one answer namely from the
person starting the poll, but as I could see this is not always the case.
Most polls actually get a few votes with 6-20 answers being the most
popular.
Around 70% of all polls get a participation of between 1 and 20 answers.
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
1-10 11-50 51-200 201-500 501-1000 1.001- 5.000-
5.000 10.000
Over 57% are small businesses with less than 10 employees. The next 34% are
companies up to 200 employees. Leaving the last 9% for those with more than
200 employees.
100%
80%
5K-10K
60%
51-250
40%
1-10
20%
0%
or 01- 0
an 00
25 5 0
50 0 0
51 0
00
10 0
25
10 10 0
-5
20
20
-1
5
26
an
1-
1-
1-
th
th
ss
Le
e
M
Looking at the spread (in %) of the followers in the three groups, we there are
some amazing facts to be observed:
Large companies (only 81 in this category) do not have that many
followers in fact the numbers seem very low which points to the fact that
even their employees are not following them. This might point to a lack
of strategy to make the employees the ambassadors for the company.
In the medium sized companies there is an even spread of followers in
each counting category.
In terms of the small companies, the number vary between 1 (mostly the
owner) and 10 followers and is much in line with the company size.
Getting started
1. Create awareness on social media for ALL your employees not just
marketing.
2. Create an inventory of where your current and future audiences are on
social media.
3. Create and implement a social media policy and inform ALL employees
of this policy.
4. Create a social media plan and make it part of the company strategy.
5. Commit resources (people, time and money) to implement, and monitor
your social media presence
Visibility
1. If and when you have social media profiles, put the links on your website!
2. Tell people what to expect when the join you in social media land.
3. Have your staff become ambassadors for the company by following your
company social media profiles.
Twitter
1. Use a representative Twitter name by which you can be found easily.
2. Give followers a reason to follow you and click through on your links.
3. Respond to tweets!
Facebook
1. Post updates regularly and include items such as video, photo, comments.
2. Encourage comment posting and respond to them
3. Do not be too commercial.
LinkedIn
1. Create or update your company profile.
2. Create groups and maintain good content discussions. Appoint good
moderator who keeps discussions going.
3. Have your employees endorse (follow) your company.
It is clear that other social media such as blogging, video (e.g YouTube for
company video’s), photo sites (e.g. Flickr) are also part of social media and can
be used to create engagement with the customers. For more tips, I would like to
refer you the Wildfire paper (http://www.wildfirepr.co.uk/tech_social_media).
Mic Adam
Social Media Policy Creator – General Manager
Vanguard Leadership
Website: www.vanguard-leadership.be
Phone: +32 478 50 41 35
e-mail: adammic@vanguard-leadership.be