According to a recently-released report, social media isn't just for improving customer relations and visibility or even helping to deal with PR crises. It's official: companies that participate actively in social media spaces such as Facebook, Twitter, blogging and podcasting have higher revenues than those that don't.
The study analyzed over 100 companies' engagement in social media across the following channels:
- blogs
- branded social network or community
- content distribution to other sites (i.e., Facebook)
- discussion forums
- external social network presence (Facebook, MySpace)
- Flickr/Photobucket
- Innovation hubs
- wikis
- ratings and reviews
- YouTube
Engagement was scored according to both the number of channels the companies participated in and their level of engagement in each--i.e., not just whether they posted but whether they responded actively to comments and initiated and participated in conversations within the space. Companies got less credit if it was clear that a third party NOT from the company was engaging on the company's behalf.
The results are telling: companies with high social engagement scores showed 18% higher revenue over the last year; those that interacted least in the social media space saw revenues drop by 6%.
This study shows that it isn't just engagement that matters; depth and breadth of engagement count as well. It isn't enough just to start a blog and hope customers will show up; with the plethora of social networks available to netizens today, it's important to reach out actively across all channels in order to reach everyone.
And what's more, it also shows that in order to be effective, social media outreach isn't passive or shallow. The companies that reaped the biggest ROI and benefits from their social media engagement are the ones that engaged deeply across multiple channels:
Basically, the more social media a company engages in, the more deeply it becomes entangled in and connected with each community, the more likely that a revenue profit will result.