44% of small companies acquire customers using social media
A Regus survey of global businesses has found small companies are doing better than large ones at using social media to attract new customers.
44% of small companies have successfully acquired a customer through social networking compared to 36% for medium sized companies and 28% of large businesses.
The most popular use of social media is keeping in touch with business contacts – 58% of respondents globally declaring they use networks in this way.
By sector, Financial Services (26%) lags behind the Media/Marketing and ICT sectors (48% & 46%). By country, India is the leading nation, followed by Mexico and Spain.
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Hi Ross,
This is really a positive survey indicator. Overall, Indian companies are exploring more Social Media platform to acquire new customers.
Good post..
One needs to ask what’s driving those statistics. I’m sure one could glean that small companies are populated with younger managers who might be more in-tune with social media and its strengths. But if you’re a large company, isn’t it harder to acquire new customers, because the reason you’re big, is because you already know most of your customers? So no matter what you do, the chances of getting someone new are less likely (economics: law of diminshing returns). Don’t also forget that most larger companies have larger in-house general counsel presence, and the rather untested legal ramifications of customer acquisition via social media can scare a larger company more than a smaller one who has, relatively speaking, more to lose. Just a few thoughts.
In my experience – Larger companies tend to throw money at social media instead of doing the real grunt work. Social media requires daily sometimes hourly updates and it takes the patience of someone whose looking to really communicate with their audience.
You can spend 250k on a youtube brand page – but it’s not going to be useful unless you take the time to interact with your users.
I would guess it’s partly a question of corporate culture and partly of resonance.
I think that with smaller companies, the individual employees feel more personally involved in the company, so are more likely to use social media to promote the company.
IMO, it also rings more true when it’s a personal kind of use, as opposed to the highly regulated and policy-bound social media use of larger companies, so the smaller ones might be more successful for that reason.