Village Gamer

Vancouver – 6S Marketing created the Canadian Social Media Survey to determine how businesses in Canada are using social media marketing for building online communities around their product offerings, and how they are using social media to increase brand authority and visibility online. The survey produced surprising stats on the use of Social Media by companies in Canada, as well as individuals.

Participants were asked about their involvement with various social media sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, as well as their age group. Not surprisingly, younger people seemed more likely to use Twitter, but the most-used social media site overall is Facebook at 69% followed by Twitter at 47% and LinkedIn at 30%.

Canadians also seem to be very active bloggers, with 74% maintaining a personal blog, 57% running a business blog, and 35% maintaining both a personal and business blog. At 63%, WordPress is the number one blogging platform of choice, followed by Blogger in a distant second with 34%.

It seems that those seeking careers and those doing the hiring still prefer to do things the old-fashioned way. Only 22% of respondents had been hired through an online application, while only 9% of those who do the hiring had found employees online. Businesses are, however, concerned about what their corporate reputation is, with 61% of corporate respondents monitoring online chatter about them. What I did find interesting in regards to business blogs is the breakdown of which department is responsible for blog postings. Marketing departments were responsible for 28% of the corporate blogs, while Management made up for 18%, Other Staff came in at 13%, IT Departments at 4%, and No Work Related Accounts came in the winner at 37%.

You can see the full survey results at 6S Marketing’s web site.