Negligence and ignorance towards Social Media

Mark and Comm Limited (MNC), a marketing and communications consultancy commissioned a study recently to gather insights into social media taking into account the Brand Finance's Top 100 Brands of 2012 in Sri Lanka, a media release from MNC said.

The social media phenomena has definitively hit Sri Lanka with brands consulting specialists and dedicating a budget exclusively for social media, the report said.

However, this was not the case with most of the brands listed in the Top 100. Social media icons were ignored in the official homepages of some of the companies.

The findings of the study were that 88 of those companies had official sites. Twenty-seven of them had a Facebook icon on their homepages, followed by Twitter at 14, YouTube at 10, Google+ at six, Flickr at five, LinkedIn at two and Foursquare at just one.

The report said that brands having zero presence on Facebook in Sri Lanka is inexcusable as it's probably the only popular social networking site with 78.59 percent of the whole online population in the country, making it the 74th on the global list with a total user-base of 1,395,960 as of end September.

However, it was revealing how brands were using them.

The banking, financial services (including leasing) and insurance industry had the most number of brands on Brand Finance's Top 100 Brands in 2012, totalling 34 out of which only eight had the Facebook icon on their homepages directed towards their official Facebook pages, followed by hospitality with eight, supermarkets, retail and e-commerce with four, telecommunications with two, food and beverages with two, motor, oil and gas with two, and building materials with zero.

Chief Executive and Director of Mark and Comm Limited, Thanzyl Thajudeen said, ''This report shows the negligence and ignorance towards Social Media with most of the brands listed in Brand Finance's Top 100 Brands of 2012. We were excited to conduct this study and have it published."