New Report Points to the Possible Saturation of Corporate Blogging

The University of Massachusetts Center for Marketing Research  just released a study of the Fortune 500 corporations and their use of social media. It indicates that the level of corporate blogging seems to have flat-lined while other social media platforms, especially Twitter, are still being adopted rapidly.

Among the Fortune 500 companies, 22% have a public blog that has been posted to within the 12 months. That’s up just 6% from a 2008 study.

The top 100 companies (20%) on the list represent 39% of the 108 blogs.

The level of interactivity each blog allowed was also reviewed — 90% percent of the Fortune 500 blogs take comments, have RSS feeds and take subscriptions.

When you look at Twitter usage the numbers show dramatically adoption. Of the 108 blogs, 93 (86%) are linked directly to a corporate Twitter account, a more than 300% increase over the 2008 study.

Of companies on the 2009 Fortune 500, 173 (35%) have a Twitter account with a post within the past 30 days. Of these companies, four of the top five corporations consistently post on their Twitter accounts. 

Podcasting and video are on the rise also. 19% of the 2009 Fortune 500 use podcasting (up from 16%) and 31% are using video on their blog sites (up from 21%).

So what does this indicate? Perhaps it points to the difficulty of maintaining a meaningful blog in a public company, which has to contend with so many regulations and legal  concerns. It’s pretty hard to sustain an authentic voice when everything must be reviewed by the legal department.

Maybe the increasing use of Twitter indicates a recognition that it is easier to push 1-line statements through legal review than a full-page commentary.  And really, does the world need another blog?

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