Corporate Social Media Use May Have Hit Plateau

Social media is everywhere these days. From your grandma to the largest corporations in America, everyone seems to be blogging, Tweeting and Facebooking. You can’t escape it, whether it’s incessant descriptions of everyday minutiae to frequent commercial appeals and everything in between.

For several years, Social media has been on the marketing cutting edge as more and more companies made it a priority. And it’s not just been the tech-related companies you might expect. Everyone from real estate agents selling Tahiti honeymoon packages to neighborhood insurance agents, retailers, restaurants, manufacturers and the list goes on and on.

But it now seems that trend may have reached its apex.

A newly released study conducted by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth suggests that may in fact be the case. Since about 2007, university researchers have been analyzing the rate Fortune 500 companies adopt technological advances. The research analyzed how these companies use publicly available blogs, Twitter accounts and Facebook pages to brand their message.

Here are some of the key findings:

In 2011, 114 of the Fortune 500 have public blogs. In 2008 16 percent of the Fortune 500 used blogs; that number grew to 22 percent in 2009 and 23 percent in 2010. For the first time since the measurements were taken, the percentage did not grow in 2011.

In 2011, 308 of the Fortune 500 have Twitter accounts – that’s 62 percent. The percentage of the top companies using Twitter at least once in the past 30 days has remained pretty static in 2010 and 2011 after an initial spike in 2009.

In 2011, 289 of the Fortune 500 companies studied had corporate Facebook pages. The rate at which companies adopted the use of Facebook has followed the same trend of blogs and Twitter.

The study concludes that the adoption of blogs, Twitter and Facebook in the 2011 listing of Fortune 500 companies has “leveled off with no significant change in the past year.”

The report goes on to state: “These results may signal a leveling off and possibly retrenchment when it comes to the adoption of social media among the 2011 F500. There is also evidence of change in the adoption of these tools by industry and a clear sign from some companies that these are not part of their communications strategy. Given that the F500 are the titans of American business, we may be seeing the slowdown in business adoption of social media.”

Whether or not the new data truly signals a sea change – once again – in how companies market their brands and deliver related messages, is yet to be seen. The data from this year and the next will either further solidify the argument or perhaps debunk the apparent trend.

But, as the social media scene continues to evolve and develop, this movement could also signal that companies are simply using different tools such as Foursquare for their communications. Or perhaps the study is correct and we’re witnessing the effects of social media over-saturation.