Findings from the Social Media and Online PR Report 2010

According to the Social Media and Online PR Report 2010 by Econsultancy and Bigmouthmedia, 95% of surveyed companies (mainly in the UK) have been involved in social media. But only 18% say they are heavily involved. 40% have experimented with social media but not done much.

The most common PR activities in social media are online traditional media relations (62%), press release posting sites and wire services (56%) adn blog relations (45%).

Other findings include:

• Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are the most widely used external websites/services.
• When asked how organisations are using Facebook, more than two thirds of companies (67%) are using Facebook as a marketing channel.
• Around a quarter of company respondents (26%) said their most senior managers were “very interested indeed” in social media, compared to 19% who said there was “very little interest”.
• Social network profile creation and management is still the most widely used social media tactic, although the proportion of companies who do this has decreased from 65% last year to 56% this year.
• Direct traffic (72%) is still regarded as the most important metric for assessing social media activity. Almost three-quarters of respondents say this is one of the three most important metrics they use.
• 45% of responding companies don’t have any policies or guidelines for the use of social media.

A sample report can be found here.