The 2011 Fortune 500 and Social Media Adoption: Have America's Largest Companies Reached a Social Media Plateau?
Fortune Magazine annually compiles a list of America’s largest corporations, aptly named the “Fortune 500” given their size and wealth. Due to the hugely influential role that these companies play in the business world, studying their usage of new technological tools like social media offers important insights into the future of commerce. While these companies may not always be the first to innovate, they do provide a look at emergent trends among America’s most successful companies.
In 2008, the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth released one of the first studies of the Fortune 500 (F500) adoption and repeated that study every year since. The study has been expanded to include the usage of the fastest growing social media tools – Facebook and Twitter.
For the first time, this latest iteration includes information on the number of Facebook fans a company has as well as the number of Twitter followers.
This research also builds on the Center’s work since 2007 examining social media in a variety of organizations including the Inc. 500, US colleges and universities and the Forbes list of the 200 largest charities (http://www.umassd.edu/cmr).
Each May the list of the top 500 companies is released in a special issue of Fortune Magazine. The Fortune 500 (F500) list includes publicly and privately held companies for which revenues are publicly available. For more information on the F500, please visit http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/.
Source: Center for Marketing Research, Charlton College of Business, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
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