powering Australia's discovery of the third place

For many organisations, integrating social media into their business is rapidly becoming a key strategic driver. In the 2010 Social Media Business Benchmarking study we commissioned with Nielsen, it was found that 40% of Australian businesses we’re adopting social media strategies prior to 2009; in 2009 this figure increased to 60%; and in 2010 71% will participate.

The study showed us that over one in four Australian businesses have a Facebook presence. Followed by Twitter (27%), YouTube (10%), Myspace (5%), and Linkedin (2%). [Note: 30% of businesses - and growing - prefer to create their own social space. We’ll get to that.] However, a typical first step into social media was Facebook, 21 per cent, to be exact. This makes sense because it’s a network that has been established. There are over 400 million active users on Facebook with 50 per cent logging on daily. More than 20 million people become fans of pages each day. (source: digitalbuzz blog) . In Australia alone, with a national population of around 22 million, as of March 2010 there were approximately 8 million registered Facebook users of which 4 million access the site monthly. Those numbers are astounding.

If you’re one of those companies who began on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube (which most are), guess what? Everything on that fan page, every fact, update, and comment that goes onto Facebook, Facebook now owns. And although it’s clearly important that you continue to leverage Facebook, for an organisation that really wants to harness the power of social media and develop a long term strategic business asset, the absolute best thing you can do is build your own. To be specific – create your own proprietary social network, and integrate it with the external social networks.

77 per cent of Australian organisations have expressed it’s important to own the information they capture and 46 per cent feel it’s too risky to have client and customer relations managed via a third party platform. However, third party or your party, social media is now more critical than ever to stakeholder connection.

What now?

As an organisation, regardless of which industry you belong to, at the end of the day, you are a brand. Brand growth requires people, which would then require brands to be in the same space that people are in.  Australians are the GLOBAL LEADERS in time spent on social media sites. This is why organisations are shifting their marketing dollars into social media, away from under performing media such as DM and Print.

In our next post, we’re going to talk about barriers we’ve seen and barriers that our research uncovered.  Then we’ll see what we can do to help break some of those down.

posted by Venessa in the category Reserach & Statistics Social Media Social networking
Tags: 2010 Social Media Business Benchamarking Study, Community Engine, nielsen