Inc. 500′s social media growth trumps Fortune 500′s

In a provocative article on Entrepreneur magazine’s blog, columnist Mikal Belicove, a social media specialist, reported there is new research showing big companies are less social media conscious than small companies. Why is that? On the flip side, what motivates smaller companies to use social media more aggressively?

The data came from the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth’s Center for Marketing Research. The center’s study, “The 2011 Fortune 500 and Social Media Adoption: Have America’s Largest Companies Reached a Social Media Plateau?” was based on data from the 2011 Fortune 500 list of companies, the Inc. 500 list of the fastest-growing private small companies, and the largest charities and institutions of higher education.

The researchers looked for blogs, Facebook pages, and Twitter followers at all of the institutions. The companies were deemed to have blogs if they had “a public-facing corporate blog from the primary corporation with posts in the past 12 months.”