According to a survey of 100 UK retailers by dotCommerce http://www.dotdigitalblog.com/ecommerce/464/ most retailers are failing to utilize social media to exploit the opportunities it offers to engage consumers. Nearly 60% of retailers have no social media presence at all! Even for the 42% that do use social media, only 32% with a Twitter or Facebook account are promoting this on their website and a mere 12% use more than one social media channel. For those that are using social media, Twitter is taking over from Facebook as the channel of choice. Retailers using Twitter are mainly using it for push marketing with 73% using it for announcing product updates, 62% for marketing and 58% to promote company news. It seems that neither large nor small retailers have embraced the idea of blogging with only 10% small and 6% large retailers having a blog.
It seems such a missed opportunity for retailers who are in the perfect position to identify their consumers and engage them via social media. Retailers should be engaging with customers to supply more of their needs and thereby secure a larger share of their expenditure. Farming their existing customers in this way would be a much more cost effective exercise than looking for new customers or, even worse, just waiting to see who wanders in!
Pretty nice post. I just stumbled upon your blog and wanted to say that I have really enjoyed browsing your blog posts. In any case I’ll be subscribing to your feed and I hope you write again soon!
Many thanks for your feedback – hope to put another post up this week. Please let me know if there’s anything specific you’re interested in. Barbara