Screengrab Ecommerce

A new report co-authored by university of Maryland and Network solutions blog.networksolutions.com has shown the prevalence of companies using social media in order to boost sales.

The figures show that a variety of tactics are being used by companies in order to add value. Facebook is seen as more popular for brand building and customer engagement while Linkedin is more useful for converting sales.

The report also highlights an apparent lack of knowledge sharing by companies through business blogging, something we can’t be accused of now!

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The recent Eurostat study http://bit.ly/7X5lHB has put Ireland at the top in terms of online turnover as a percentage of total turnover. This is a great vindication of the vibrancy of the market here. It also may show some underlining information. Figures like this suggest that Irish internet users have a much higher trust level in terms of using credit cards online. It also points to the convenience factor that people crave, with consumers not always free to shop in the conventional sense. The study does however neglect to mention the sectors in which the highest proportion of turnover was online. It would be safe to assume that insurance would be a major contributor to skew these figures. The percentage of turnover for more physical goods would certainly be much more conservative.

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A new report from Burson-Marsteller http://www.burson-marsteller.com/Default.aspx has brought focus upon some of the benefits that large companies are gaining from engaging in social media. One of the main concerns that top level executives have had with allowing resources to be allocated to social media is it’s difficulty to measure for ROI. Although it is difficult to put a monetary value on the return from social media engagement we can see from this report that this may be due to the intangible nature of the benefits gained. The most fruitful returns for companies from social media listed below are ranked for effectiveness in engaging with stakeholders.

1. Increased brand reputation
2. Increased brand awareness
3. Improved page rank
4. Web traffic increase
5. Generating leads
6. Increase sales

It would in fact be fair to say that the more quantifiable the benefit from social media the lower it’s return. This can be construed in many different ways. Personally I see this as an indication of the casual nature of the medium. Social networking has largely become about business goals and sales as an end result but in order to get there the social aspect must be respected. This can be corroborated by looking at any of the twitter feeds that are only interested in going straight for a sale without interspersing their tweets with personable information or updates on products. These twitter feeds are widely considered against the spirit of the format and not very popular as a result. There are exceptions to this of course such as the Dell twitter feed http://twitter.com/delloutlet which is very upfront about it’s purpose.

There is plenty of information out there about how best to use twitter for business so I’m not going to go there. Social media for business can simply be compared with working the room at a function or seminar, it’s difficult to put a value on it but we know how important it is to get out there!

The original report can be found here: http://www.burson-marsteller.com/Innovation_and_insights/blogs_and_podcasts/BM_Blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=160
More analysis at RRW here: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5662/Fortune-100-Giants-Making-Splashes-in-Social-Media.aspx?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HubSpot+%28HubSpot%29&utm_content=Netvibes

-- Screengrab ecommerce www.screengrabecommerce.com info@screengrabecommerce.com

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