Quebec Businesses Use Twitter Five Times Less than their US Counterparts, According to the multiple-media.com Barometer Survey

Only a negligible minority–6%–of Quebec companies use Twitter in their marketing strategies, according to most recent multiple-media.com Barometer, a series of surveys carried out by Web agency multiple-media.com on the adoption of Web technologies by Quebec companies.

“Our initial question was, ‘Is the inclusion of Twitter in online strategies on par with the ‘noise’ that this social media is making?”, said Renato Cudicio, president of multiple-media.com.

The results of the telephone interviews conducted with 200 Quebec marketing and IT executives will be a disappointment for the (many) fans of the microblogging platform: so far, very few Quebec companies have included Twitter in their marketing strategy.

By comparison, a similar study shows that American companies are five times more likely to use Twitter:  in the US, 31% of large B2B businesses, 32% of small B2B businesses and an astonishing 37% of B2C companies use the popular social media platform.

“The problem, in my opinion, is not the fact that we’re not utilizing Twitter, but that it’s for the wrong reasons”, says Cudicio. “In other words, we’re not leaving this tool on the shelf because it makes ROI difficult to measure–which is actually the case–or because the competition isn’t using it, but simply because we know nothing about its potential and because we suppose that our competitors aren’t using it, when in fact we have no idea.”

Over the course of its series of surveys on the adoption of Web technologies, the multiple media.com Barometer team has noted that, all in all, Quebec companies don’t monitor the evolution of technologies, and they don’t seem to keep tabs on the competition in this respect. Therefore they have no idea if their competitors are active or not on Twitter.

Despite the hype, Cudicio believes that one should think twice before dismissing this social media platform as a fad: first, it yields a wealth of information about consumers and, second, since it is now referred by search engines it plays an increasingly important role in good SEO strategies.

This being said, it seems that those few companies who do “tweet” are already active with company blogs and other social media like Facebook. Encouragingly, these businesses seem to fully realize and leverage the potential of the microblogging platform.

The multiple-media.com Barometer
The multiple-media.com Barometer was created to generate a better understanding of how Quebec companies integrate Web technologies into their marketing communication strategies. Every month, multiple-media.com takes the pulse of medium and large Quebec companies through telephone interviews with Marketing and IT executives. The maximum margin of error is 6.9%, 19 times out of 20 and multiple-media.com has partnered with BIP, a marketing research company recognized for its precision and extensive experience, to carry out these surveys. Main topics so far: how companies use–or don’t use–emails, YouTube, and Facebook for marketing purposes.

multiple-media.com and MMCM
multiple-media.com offers integrated Web strategy, content and application development services, differentiating  itself since its creation in 1997 through the high quality of its client services, the reliability of its solutions, and the excellence of its productions which efficiently blend communication and technologies. The Montreal agency has developed several Web applications, including MMCM, a powerful proprietary CMS that non-technical users can leverage to securely build and maintain multilingual websites and portals in real time.