Thanks to a new study released by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, blogs around the internet are declaring LinkedIn the new king of the social media mountain. Not only does this draw some unrealistic conclusions from the data, but it also ignores some of the more potent, useful information found in the study.
Most articles are citing the data visualized in the image to the left, which would seem to indicate LinkedIn is rapidly overtaking other social networks for business use, but with any study of this nature you have to look at the sample. In this case, the data came from a survey performed on business listed in the Inc. 500, an index of the 500 fastest-growing private businesses. It’s a small sample, and the companies listed here would seem to share a specific characteristic – a strong focus on growth.
Stop Trying to Pigeonhole Businesses into a Specific Social Media Venue
It would have been great to see some information about the specific industries of the companies surveyed. It seems likely that what looks like an overall shift in preferred social network is actually evidence of how the specific types of companies surveyed best use social media, and not a directive for all businesses.
As marketers in the social media arena, we need to be extra careful not to fall into this sort of trap. For example, were I to recommend that a client at a B to C that sells a physical product focus the bulk of their efforts on LinkedIn, I’d be doing them a great disservice. People don’t shop or window shop on LinkedIn. It doesn’t even begin to have the same consumer power as more visual venues like Pinterest, YouTube or even Facebook.
In fact, if you take a quick look at the full list of 5000 Inc. published in 2012, you’ll find certain types of industries filling pages and pages of data: Business Products and Services, Advertising and Marketing, and IT Services are among the top performers. Even companies in the top 500 who list themselves as providing Consumer Products and Services tend to be in fields like investing and event planning.
Take this report and others like it with a grain of salt, and realize that there hasn’t been one social network to rule them all for many, many years. You have to understand who your customers are and what motivates them, and develop your social media strategies based on that information. Reaching the largest audience of people who aren’t looking for your products or services generates the wrong kind of leads, if you get any leads at all.
What the Study Does Tell Us
Looking beyond the catchy headline, you can actually dig down and find some really useful information from this study. Once you understand that the survey respondents were from growth-focused businesses, you can learn a lot about how they accomplish that growth.
63% of respondents stated that their CEO is active in their content creation and social media, and blogs are far more popular among the Inc. 500 companies than among the Forbes 500 – a list that tends to include more established businesses. This tells us that businesses using social media avenues to increase growth are finding success with those methods, and that their growth is also due in part to humanizing their upper management, thereby giving a level of transparency to their corporate culture.
This information is the real take away from the study. Concepts like blogging and increased visibility for upper management span every industry, and these methods seem to have proven successful for the businesses on the list.