Canadian companies are failing to engage with their customers through social media, a report released Tuesday has found.
Only 17 per cent of 1,000 executives surveyed by Leger Marketing on behalf of SAS Canada this year said their company regularly posts to websites such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn while also monitoring them to gauge how the online community views their business.
While the poll was focused specifically on Canada, SAS found the results surprisingly lower than comparable rates of corporate social media engagement in other countries.
"There are some unique differences when you look at Canada relative to what we see happening in other areas," said Lori Bieda, executive lead of customer intelligence for Toronto-based SAS.
"Canadians are thorough in their evaluation, but slower to take things up."
Nearly twice as many respondents (30 per cent) said their company regularly monitors social-media websites for mentions as those who said their company both monitors and posts.
To Bieda, that suggests Canadian businesses are still testing the waters of social media as an engagement tool, while those in other countries, such as the United States, have already started to swim.
"What I see in particular stateside, on account of what happened to their economy for a lot of retailers and a lot of banks and even in some other areas, is they have leveraged social media in an effort to repair some of their battered brands," she said. "The Canadians have not had to go through that, as our economy has been quite healthy."
Part of the reason companies in Canada are still just looking to see what is being said about them online without responding has to do with the more conservative business culture in Canada, Bieda said.
Another more practical reason, according to 49 per cent of respondents who said their company does no social-media monitoring at all, is a simple lack of resources.
"A lot of Canadian firms are juggling multiple initiatives in social media," Bieda said. "So it is just freeing up the necessary resources."
In the meantime, the longer Canadian businesses take to establish more comprehensive social-media strategies, the greater the chances of them losing touch with their audience, Bieda said.
"By not analyzing and not engaging in those forms, you essentially risk your relationships with customers and you risk not understanding when they're in jeopardy, when you need to intervene," said Bieda.
"Our customers now are talking. We're just not listening as well as we could."
The survey was conducted online between Jan. 6 and 27.
With a sample size of 1,000 "senior-level decision-makers" working at mid-sized (50,500 employees) to large (500 or more employees) companies in Canada, it is considered accurate within a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
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