Companies Use Social Media For What?

While almost every company uses social media, the top initiative for doing so may be different than one might think - recruitment.

The "ROI of Social Media in the Enterprise" survey from SelectMinds - a developer of social recruiting and community management solutions - shows that while 86 percent of firms are using social media in their organizations, the top social media initiative is recruiting/talent acquisition, at 72 percent.

According to the survey, 81 percent of the participating HR professionals claim to use social networks to help recruit candidates, with LinkedIn and Facebook being the most frequently used sites.

And although most corporations are maintaining Facebook pages, LinkedIn groups and Twitter accounts - in-house social networks have also gained momentum, with 63 percent of respondents claiming that their companies are using social networks for current employees.

For corporations using an in-house network, most (62%) are using it for job listing/recruiting, while 53 percent use it for training and learning and 52 percent use it for HR benefits/incentives, event information or accessing news.

In a correlating - yet still surprising - revelation, one of the most common metrics used for evaluating social media programs is the amount of hires that come from social networks, at 66 percent. While 65 percent evaluate social media success by website visitors and 63 percent count Facebook fans.

Furthermore, 69 percent of corporations think that social media is important enough to increase their social media budgets, yet only 5 percent rated themselves as "very confident" that they are accurately measuring the ROI of their social media activities.

So, although according to this study, companies seem not to be sure if their social media strategies are working. At least we know someone is getting recruited during this rough economic time.