Fortune 500 companies are increasingly using visual social networks such as Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat, according to recent research conducted by Nora Ganim Barnes and Shannen Pavao at The Center for Marketing Research, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.
The report was based on analysis of the social media accounts and blogs of companies on the 2017 Fortune 500 list. The researchers looked at channel usage at the corporate level, not the brand level (e.g., whether Apple, not iTunes, has an account).
LinkedIn is the most popular social network with Fortune 500 companies: 498 firms on the list (98%) have accounts on the platform.
Twitter is the second most popular platform (88% of firms have accounts), and Facebook is the third most popular (85%).
Three-quarters of Fortune 500 companies now have YouTube accounts, up nine percentage points from last year; 10% have Snapchat accounts.
Pinterest and Google+ both had declines in usage by Fortune 500 brands in the past year.
Some 53% of Fortune 500 companies now have Instagram accounts, up from just 9% in 2013.
Some 42% of Fortune 500 companies have public-facing corporate blogs, up from 36% last year.
Just over half (51%) of the top 200 companies on the Fortune 500 list have public-facing corporate blogs, compared with 35% of the bottom 200 companies on the list.
About the research: The report was based on analysis of the social media accounts and blogs of companies on the 2017 Fortune 500 List. The researchers looked at channel usage at the corporate level, not the brand level (e.g., Apple, not iTunes).
