How active are DiscountASP.NET customers in social media?

As businesses and organizations increasingly embrace social media to communicate and build relationships with their customers in this new era of transparency and engagement, we thought it would be interesting to explore how active our customers were in using social media sites.

A survey was conducted in March 2012 and we received 701 responses from our U.S. based customers. In the survey, we asked our clients to rate how active they were in using Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook and to select from four options, including “Do Not Use,” “Set up account, but never use,” “Use occasionally,” and “Active User.”

For the purpose of this post we only show the percentage of the “Active Users” for each of the social media sites.

The chart below shows the number of active members among top social media, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook in the U.S. The data was compiled from the social media companies press releases and their “about us” pages. As Facebook is planning to go public this month, the company submitted paperwork to the SEC and reported to have reached 901 million active users on April 23, 2012 (1). LinkedIn reported 161 million professional users at the end of March 2012 (2). As Twitter turned six years old, the company announced having 140 million users at March 21, 2012 (3). To celebrate his first anniversary as the CEO of the world’s largest search engine, Larry Page wrote a post in early April 2012 and announced that Google+ had registered over 100 million users (4).

Observing the results of our customer survey, the top social media site actively used by DiscountASP.NET customers was Facebook. The survey showed that 43% of our clients are active users of Facebook. In the second spot was LinkedIn with 20% of our clients claiming to be active users. In the third place was Twitter with 16% of our clients being active users. And finally, in the last position was Google+ with 8% of our clients being active users.

Of course, Google+ is the newest social media site to launch (in 2011) and both Facebook and LinkedIn have been around a lot longer, so the fourth position for Google+ is expected. Facebook, by far is the most actively used social media site and Google+ has its work cut out to catch up. In future surveys, we can monitor how the usage of these social media sites and other emerging sites change over time among our clients.