LinkedIn Most Popular Social Media Network for Fortune 500 companies

According to a recent research study conducted at The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, LinkedIn continues to be the most popular social network for Fortune 500 companies (98 percent), but more and more are incorporating visual social networks such as Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat into their social media strategy.

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).

Twitter is the second most popular platform (88 percent) with Facebook logging in as the third most popular (85 percent).

Three-quarters of Fortune 500 companies now have YouTube accounts, up nine percentage points from the previous year; 10 percent have Snapchat accounts.

Pinterest and Google+ both had declines in usage by Fortune 500 brands in the past year. This is consistent with brands overall.  And nearly 53 percent of Fortune 500 companies now have Instagram (which is now linked to Facebook) accounts, up from just 9 percent in 2013.

Unlike other social media research, these researchers consider blogs to be social media platforms (we agree) with 42 percent of companies hosting a public-facing blog.