Introduction

There are numerous studies that cover the growth and adoption of social media and delve into current and newly emerging social media channels. With dozens of growth indicators and proliferation as well as increasing numbers of channels, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, Weibo, Renren, and more, the legitimacy and impact of social media is no longer a question. What is in question, however, is how enterprises can better manage and harness this ever-evolving medium. One of the key phenomena that has developed is the increasing number of social accounts that companies create, run, and own on each of the social channels. Each day, more and more accounts are created for marketing, sales, support, various products, and individual brands, etc. Accounts should be defined as the company’s Facebook pages, YouTube channels, LinkedIn pages, Twitter accounts, etc. Whatever the platform, each is a discrete instance of social communication infrastructure to which users and applications will connect and share content.

As an example, according to research in 2012 from Burson-Marsteller on the use of social media among the Fortune 100 companies, 87% of Fortune 100 companies are using accounts on at least one major social platform to communicate with online stakeholders, and 82% of those companies have at least one Twitter account. Perhaps more revealingly, a 2011 survey by the Altimeter Group found that enterprises average 178 social media accounts across the leading social networks. This wave of rapid and widespread account creation has only continued since then. Today, the average brand has more than 300 social media accounts, according to Nexgate’s research. But unlike an organization’s communication channels that are well known, measured, and managed like email or even its websites, social media channels have been treated differently. One reason for this is that they have not been defined or managed as communication infrastructure, and therefore, not clearly understood by the key stakeholders within the organization.

Without a clearly defined view and understanding of this social media infrastructure by the teams that traditionally manage communications (e.g., Information Technology teams), it is difficult to truly maximize social’s enormous potential and minimize its burden and risk. The following study is thus not only intended to provide context around what infrastructure some of the world’s most well known brands own on social media, but also provide recommendations for maximizing investment in that infrastructure. This study and perspective will provide a foundation for all organizations to properly frame and develop their own social media environment and infrastructure.

Research Methodology

From July 2013 to June 2014, Nexgate researched the accounts created and run by each of the respective Fortune 100 companies on each of the top social networks, focusing primarily on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. After finding roughly 32,000 accounts run by those 100 companies, Nexgate explored the activity on those accounts represented by more than 60 million pieces of content and 2,100 unique applications used by those brands to communicate. That brand-generated content resulted in nearly 1 billion pieces of engagement such as likes, shares, followers, subscribers, and more. The accounts, content, public communications, applications used, and social metadata, which includes such information as the time of the post and how the post was published, were collected using Nexgate’s patent-pending technology using approved API integrations with the social media platform’s public APIs. Nexgate’s technology, expert systems, and researchers applied thousands of unique contextual, linguistic, behavioral, application, and content classifiers to this data in order to accurately find company accounts, activity, and the related risks to them or on them.

Summary of Results

How Much Infrastructure Was Found

• The typical Fortune 100 company has an average of 320 branded social media accounts. We discovered some brands with upwards of 3,000 accounts and that is excluding those created by branch offices or franchises.
• Roughly 50% of those accounts are on Facebook, 30% on Twitter, and the rest are spread across LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google+.

How Robust/Complex Is That Infrastructure?

• There are 2,135 distinct applications used across all of the Fortune 100 accounts by companies to post, tweet, upload, and publish their content on their accounts.
• The average company has installed or authorized 13 distinct publishing applications and tools across its social media accounts
• Native Apps, such as the Web, or apps like Twitter for Blackberry are used to publish over 2 million of the posts and tweets by companies, or nearly 70% of their activity, with nearly 16% of that being native mobile apps. Professional solutions that companies purchased for social publishing make up nearly 900,000 company communications on their social accounts, or just over 30% of total communications, suggesting that much of a company’s investment in social communications goes unused.

How Active Is That Infrastructure?

• There are 58,484,910 total pieces of communication (communications are posts, tweets, comments, etc.) across the Fortune 100 accounts that Nexgate scanned.
• There are nearly 4.1 billion Likes, Followers, Subscribers, and Plus Ones across the Fortune 100 accounts for just Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google+.

Vertical Trends

• Media companies have the greatest number of accounts on average, comprising of at least 26% of all Facebook accounts and at least 95% of all YouTube accounts. Media as a vertical also has the most accounts in total, with at least 8,300 accounts, followed by finance, with 4,3000 accounts (13.4% of all social media accounts across all properties) and health/pharma with 2,400 accounts (7.2% of all social accounts).
• Media companies also account for the most number of distinct apps, with 72.2% of all unique apps, or a total of 1,541 apps. Financial companies and health/pharma follow with 908 and 676 unique apps, respectively, which translates into 42.5% and 31.6% of all apps, respectively.
• Media accounts lead again in terms of level of communication activity with over twice the amount of brand communications as any other vertical, creating about 52.3% of all brand posts from any social media property, or about 2 million posts and tweets. Financial accounts are represented by 21.6% of all posts (826,664 posts or tweets), while health/pharma accounts account for 16.5% of all brand posts (630,046 posts or tweets).
• Media companies are responsible for 71.2% of all social media comments, or 40,413,754 comments, while financial companies are represented by 15.2% of all comments, or 8,638,732 comments, and health/pharma companies are represented by 7.9% of all comments, or 4,486,728 comments.
• Media claims 70.4% of all engagement, which equates to 2,865,352,347 followers, subscribers, Likes, and Plus Ones. Finance has 11.8% of all engagement, or 479,715,941 followers, subscribers, Likes, and Plus Ones. Health/pharma has 7.6% of total engagement, or 309,334,848 followers, subscribers, Likes, and Plus Ones.

Growth Trend

As traditional communications mediums like websites and email accounts have done in the past, the number of social media accounts per brand will inevitably continue to grow every day as organizations further integrate with the social world and as additional social networks emerge. But the differences between social infrastructure and that of its traditional counterparts intensify the speed at which social media has and will continue to expand and the dynamic, multi-dimensional communication and interaction that happens on each social media account from posts and comments to direct messages and more.

Social media is unlike any technology that has come before it in that it is not just a communication infrastructure, but a consumerized one. Whereas the web and email are both owned and operated ‘in-house’ assets of corporate IT teams, branded social media accounts, their authorized applications, and the activity occurring on them live outside the corporate control perimeter within the social platforms themselves. In other words, everything that occurs on a company Facebook page, for example, exists within Facebook, rather than within the purview and control of that company’s marketing and tech professionals.

This means that building a website and assigning a domain or email address, for example, are significantly more labor-intensive and restrictive than creating a social media account, which can be made by virtually anyone, anytime, anywhere. Oftentimes, especially when it comes to large, well-known brands like the Fortune 100, this is reflected in the extensive and ever-growing number of social media accounts per brand. Since these accounts can be created with very little friction, they are made by a wide variety of people for any number of reasons. For example, different departments within one company might create certain pages for recruitment, while others might be geared towards marketing the brand or certain campaigns or products. This range of uses reinforces the cycle of account creation.

Moreover, each of these social accounts or “properties” behaves as an infrastructure with its own complex user and app environment. For every account, there is significantly more content exchanged within its borders and a far greater number of dimensions – from the ability to broadcast brand content to messaging and micro-blogging – than either email or the web. The cocreative aspect of social media means that both users and brands are contributing content to these properties. Indeed, Nexgate’s study indicates that brand-generated content makes up only 6.3% of the roughly 60 million pieces of content across the Fortune 100 companies’ social accounts. These unique features of social infrastructure make it an incredibly large and complex network poised for even further growth and complexity

Recommendations

While one of the unique virtues of social media is certainly its spontaneous and organic nature, failure to recognize that the social accounts run by companies and ensuing ecosystems around those accounts are very real communication infrastructure that requires monitoring and protection creates an equally real inability to effectively maximize potential ROI and minimize risk. Every aspect of efficiency, consistency, scale, and security is challenged by the sheer amount of Fortune 100 infrastructure and activity on that infrastructure. Unfortunately, that challenge is just as persistent when it comes to the Global 100,000, which means that companies of every size must take necessary security measures.

The first step in addressing these challenges is simply recognizing social accounts as robust and complex communication infrastructure. From there, getting visibility and a clear picture of the physical makeup of your organization’s social infrastructure is critical. Brands can then best identify what strategies are working and what might be deterring progress. For example, the average Fortune 100 brand uses more than 13 tools for social publishing and communication across its accounts, but only 30% of that activity is from professional enterprise social publishing, selling, and marketing tools. How coordinated and efficient can those social communications be if they are made using more than a dozen different apps?

Similarly, another area of vulnerability is clearly the security of that social infrastructure. In all other communication channels (e.g., web and email), organizations employ anti-fraud, anti-hacking, anti-malware, anti-spam, and data loss prevention technology to protect their infrastructure, the activity on that infrastructure, and the employees, partners, and customers using that infrastructure to communicate. In social media communications, however, few organizations have any security. A detailed explanation for this will be provided in Nexgate’s subsequent reports; however, much of the reason for limited security can be gleaned from the fact that social communication infrastructure is born out of marketing, not IT, as is the case with email, web, and other, more traditional communications.

As a corollary to this study, Nexgate also examined the risk to the Fortune 100 social media infrastructure and it is clear – as is reflected in recent newspaper headlines announcing new social media account hacks and security breaches weekly – that security is still an unaddressed issue that poses a very real threat to corporate social media infrastructure. The results of Nexgate’s security risk research will be published in a subsequent report.

Conclusion

Company-owned and affiliated social media pages, profiles, and accounts within the different social networks are more than just sources of ads, conversations, and sentiment, but true infrastructure that requires the same kind of corporate-level acknowledgement and treatment as the other website and email infrastructures that make up an organization’s valuable and interactive communication channels.

The following two installments of our study of the Fortune 100’s social media will cover the ways in which social’s unique infrastructure has created a new requirement for companies to adopt a different kind of security and compliance, and the steps necessary to mitigate the security threats as well as the compliance risks while maximizing social media ROI.