Fastest growing companies flock to Linkedin

28, 2013, 11:25am PST Updated: Feb 28, 2013, 1:47pm PST

Fastest growing companies flock to LinkedIn, abandon Facebook

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Facebook is losing ground among the nation's fastest growing companies, while LinkedIn is becoming more common as an aspect of their social media strategy

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Jon Xavier

Web Producer- Silicon Valley Business Journal

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Social media spending at the nation's fastest growing companies is increasing, but more and more of that cash is going toward LinkedIn, not Facebook.
That was the finding of a study by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, which examined social media use by companies listed on the Inc. 500 list. The number of companies using Facebook declined to 67 percent, while the number that said they used LinkedIn shot up to 81 percent. Last year, Facebook and LinkedIn were neck in neck among respondents, with 74 and 73 percent of companies saying they use them, respectively.
Twitter use was essentially flat, with 64 percent of companies reporting they used it compared with 67 percent last year. Foursquare saw a bump, with 28 percent of companies using it compared with 13 the year before, and Youtube increased to 45 percent from 30 percent last year.

Newcomer Pinterest is also doing well — less than two years after its launch, the service is already being used by 18 percent of respondents.

The report comes as a validation for LinkedIn, which has been angling to become an essential tool for business with advanced products for recruiting, and which has reinvented itself as a content destination by beefing up its distribution tools with things like LinkedIn Today.
It's not good news for Facebook, however. The company has been trying to prove its value to brands as it tries to grow its revenue as a public company, but it's suffered a series of missteps, such as alienating the operators of Facebook pages by charging them to reach all of their followers, and then admitting that the metrics they use to gauge how many people see a post were flawed.

Jon Xavier is Web Producer at the Business Journal. His phone number is 408.299.1826.