The Dealerist's Blog helping dealers get the most out of social media

Social Media Goes Corporate

An interesting study crossed my desk today, the 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Studyby Ben Hanna, Ph.D. the VP of Marketing for R.H. Donnelley Interactive.

While the study does not directly address the retail application of Social Media, it does reflect a growing trend of mainstream use of Social Media not only by individuals, but also by businesses.  Over 4,000 respondents were surveyed and even though the study focused mainly on business to business use of Social Media there were some surprising revelations.

If you've read some of my past articles you know that the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is the age 40 to 50 segment.  However, it may surprise you that know that of this study's respondents 58% were C-Level Executives (CEO, CFO President, etc.)   One thing that jumped out to me was that only 2% of respondents listed their industry as automotive.  In case you're interested the leading field was listed as retail followed closely by health care.

Information sources that did not require active participation such as webinars, podcasts reading ratings or reviews etc. were rated as more useful participating in discussions or forums.  I found this particularly interesting because it has been said by more than a few experts that Social Media sites will soon be the new search engines.  If this is the case then you might be wise to start advertising on these sites. 

Webinars were listed as very useful.  Is there an application here for the retail car business?  Maybe a webinar to show owners how to perform routine inspections or how to use complicated features such as navigation?

Most were new to the business use of Social Media with 35% having spent less than one year managing or involved in the Social Media initiatives of their companies.  Over 70% of the companies had less than two years of experience in Social Media. 

So what are all these newbies doing for their business?  The most popular was maintain company related accounts or profiles on the Social Media sites.  Second was monitoring company related "mentions" on Social Media sites.  Maintaining the company blog was a very close third.  

A lot of companies (54%) reported using Social Media to monitor their users / customers ratings and reviews and 53% monitored their competitors mentions. 

The 44 page study reveals that a relative new media is rapidly becoming a mainstream business tool.  You can read the study at http://www.business.com/info/business-social-media-benchmark-study.

Is your dealership engaged?  If you want to find out simple and easy ways to get your store started call me at 502-689-5370 or contact me at Twitter, I am @dealerist.