Although the world and his dog are crooning about how wonderful Google+ is, we shouldn’t forget that the king of that particular hill is still – by a very long way – Facebook. The king of the social networks currently boasts around three quarters of a billion users, and seems to be finally cracking one of the biggest nut of them all – the FTSE 100.
The FTSE 100 represents the one hundred most valuable companies traded on the London Stock Exchange and includes giants like BP, GlaxoSmithKline, Lloyds Banking Group and Unilever. An investigation by communications consultancy The Group has found that the population of FTSE 100 companies on Facebook has gone up a massive 50% in just the last seven months, after being relatively stagnant for the preceding twelve months.
Smaller social network Twitter saw a more modest 25% gain amongst the same group of firms – although the number of corporations with Twitter accounts remains higher than those with Facebook pages – 56 vs 38. YouTube usage grew 12% and the number of corporate blogs stayed the same.
While smaller, nimbler companies have embraced Facebook as a proactive way to communicate with their clients and engage prospective customers, larger corporations seem to have remained a little gun-shy as they wait for Facebook to prove itself as a money-spinner. Facebook is quick to point to its sky-high pageviews and the amount of time users spend on their site to entice companies to create pages, however a recent report by Forrester painted a less rosy picture, saying firms were better off sticking to traditional marketing channels such as email and banner advertising.
Business intelligence firm Microstrategy launched the first serious entry into the emerging social analytics for enterprise market at its annual conference next week, and encouraged large firms to dive into Facebook’s largely untapped waters.
