Results tagged “socialnetworking” from Trends in the Living Networks

The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research has recently released research on the use of social media by the Inc 500, which are the 500 fastest growing privately owned companies in the US as ranked by Inc. magazine. This is one of the first longitudinal studies, showing changes in adoption of social media tools from one year ago. The topline results are shown below.

The researchers point to the significantly higher usage of social media by these companies compared to the Fortune 500. A few thoughts on this point and the research findings generally:

Fast growth vs large companies. Fast growing companies by necessity are open to new tools and approaches, and tend to have a culture of adoption and innovation, meaning they’re more likely to experiment with social media tools. There are no studies I’m aware of comparing growth rates of companies and their use of social media, and the causality would be very difficult to unpick, but I believe that consistent rapid growth will be hard to achieve without social media tools to facilitate effective collaboration in the organization.