While social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook have long been used as a really great way to kill an afternoon, more businesses are seeing the truly positive effects the sites can have.
More and more businesses are allowing their employees to spend at least some of their work time on social media, as it appears happier employees are more efficient. Now a new study shows that more and more businesses use them to handle their customer service interactions.
The research firm Sword Ciboodle released data which took a large group of companies in the United States and the United Kingdom and evaluated how those companies use sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google+. In the end, the survey included more than 400 companies across a wide variety of different sectors of the business world.
According to the survey, 59 percent of the companies included in research have adopted Twitter, and 60 percent of those companies have started to use Facebook in order to get their name out there. A large 85 percent of respondents said if they had adopted one of the two sites, they had adopted both.
Of course, just how each company uses these social networking site changes based on a variety of different factors. It appears that one of the biggest factors in how often and for what these sites are used is based on the size of the company. Business size also seems to determine how long they've been using the sites for things like customer interaction.
According to research, 40 percent of companies with more than 1,000 employees have been using Facebook or Twitter for customer interaction for at least two years. For companies with far fewer employees, 53 percent say that they have used social networking for less than two years.
Still the most popular reason for all companies to use these sites is a sort of “social customer service.” 56 percent site that reason as the driving force behind using these sites, while 40 percent simply said they were trying to keep up with their competitors.