Industry & Business Insights

Doxim Social Media Survey – Results

In late September we kicked off an online survey to gain some insights into the penetration of social media in our client base. We received over 50 responses, the majority coming from financial institutions with under 20,000 clients.

We thought you’d be interested in seeing some brief highlights of the consolidated results:

75% of respondents use social media in their personal lives , with the vast majority using Facebook:

If YES, which services do you use (please check all that apply)?

Facebook 92.31%
LinkedIn 58.97%
Twitter 28.21%

However, despite this high level of personal experience with the medium, nearly 63% respondents indicated that their organization has not yet started using social media in their own marketing mix.

For the 37% that have started using social media, the vast majority are using Facebook (94%) followed by YouTube (39%), with LinkedIn and Twitter coming a distant third at 16% a piece.

Interestingly, those organizations that are not yet using social media expect that Twitter will be a primary focus, once they get started. Yet the results from actual users indicate that YouTube will likely prove to be a much more important communications vehicle.

Perhaps most important of all are the the benefits of actually having started using social media. For those organizations that are already using social media for marketing there have been two overwhelmingly valuable outcomes:

How has your organization benefited from its social media outreach? (Check all that apply.)

Signed-up new customers 66.67%
Increased your profile in the community 73.33%

Of the 63% of respondents that said their own organization has not yet started to use social media only half actually have any concrete plans to use it. And, of these organizations, 35% don’t plan on starting until the second half of next year and 41% don’t even have a start date in mind as yet!.

Conclusions/Observations

1. Organizations that have still to jump on the bandwagon would do well to ramp up investigations on how to best leverage YouTube vs. worrying about which tweet aggregator to use.
2. Given the benefits that ‘early adopters’ seem to be enjoying, in terms of new customer acquisition and increase community profile it might make sense to rethink plans and get that social media program up and rolling sooner rather than later

If you’re interested you can review the complete survey results here.

PRIZE WINNER

To encourage survey participation we offered a prize draw for an iPod Touch. We’re happy to announce the winner of the draw is Elaine Renault from First Ontario Credit Union. Congratulations Elaine!