Social Media & Business Use in Atlantic Canada Update

Citizen or “netizen” use of social media technologies in Atlantic Canada is fairly high at around 78% of the online population. So what about business use? We monitor such activity on an ongoing basis in Atlantic Canada, UK and Northeastern US. So here’s a quick update on usage in Atlantic Canada this year.

Trend: While we’ve seen a 32% increase in businesses using social media in Atlantic Canada this year over 2009, what we’ve really noticed is “individual use”, that is, professionals, use social media more than a “business entity.” We define a business entity as a company that has a presence in a social media channel.

Professional Usage: Professionals use of social media tools is up 48% over 2009. The most popular business social media tool in Atlantic Canada is LinkedIn followed by Plaxo. eCademy and FastPitch are distant third and fourth respectively. We also note that “knowledge workers” or “white collar” professions are more active than “blue collar” or “skilled trades”. Knowledge workers dominate this space for business use. The top professions using business social networking tools are; 1) marketing, 2) public relations, 3) insurance/finance, 4) real-estate and 5) technology.

Business Usage: Businesses are increasing their usage of social media tools, mostly for marketing messages. The most popular channels for businesses in Atlantic Canada are LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and blogging. The most popular blogging platform is WordPress followed by blogger.

We do note that although blogging is up 21% over 2009, businesses will average 1 blog post per month only. In 67% of the instances where we looked at a business blog, the blog design did not match their website design or corporate branding. This can lead to prospective mistrust amongst potential customers and purchase dissonance.

Conclusion: We forecast growth in use of social media by businesses this year and are seeing slightly higher use than we expected. We do note that businesses tend to have one person who engages the most with social technologies. We saw that 43% of businesses that use social media have sales professionals as their front while 40% were marketing and the remaining 17% were public relations/communications professionals.

Methodology: We monitor 1,500 business domains across Atlantic Canada (similar and scaled to population in UK and NE USA) with our crawler then running search intervals every month. Data is then compiled through our Artificial Intelligence Engine and reviewed by two analysts. We combine automated and physical research and analysis. We began benchmarking in 2008 and now have two years of statistical data on usage in these regions.