Study: The State of Social Media for Business 2010

More than 6, 000 SmartBrief readers participated in a study of social media usage by businesses. You can download the overview of the results. The State of Social Media for Business 2010 shares some of the biggest trends in social media as well as the challenges that companies need to address as they move forward with their social media strategies.

Some of the results from the study:

• Most companies surveyed (66.5%) have adopted social media in the past 18 months.
• Companies are focusing their energies on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and blogs.
• Brand building is currently the primary purpose for business social media usage (94.1%).
• Lack of management support (33.3%) and confidentiality concerns (33.1%) are atop the list of obstacles to social media adoption.
• Less than 15% of the businesses using social media are measuring ROI.
• While 60% of respondents say their companies are using social media, there is low confidence in their social media strategies.

Dreamgrow conducted similar survey in Estonia (August 2010) and the results match closely what SmartBrief found. Interestingly one third (35%) of Estonian marketers said that they are measuring ROI of their social media activities. The main obstacles to social-media adoption in our survey were lack of knowledge/skills (33%) and time (30%).