50% Latin American Businesses Go Social (Networks)

Just about half of businesses in Latin America use social media networks as part of their marketing strategies, according to the “2010 Latin America Social Media Study” by Burson-Marsteller. This compares to 79% of companies globally.

The study looked at 160 of the highest-revenue companies in:  Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Puerto Rico, Mexico and Venezuela. Businesses using the at least one social media platform by country were:  80% in Mexico, 75% in Venezuela, 5% in Puerto Rico and 25% in Argentina.

What’s more, the Economic Times reported recently that Spanish is the third most used language on the entire Internet, after English and Chinese.

Facebook was the most popular social network, used by 39% of the companies, with 55% of them having analyzed posts from fans on their Pages.  According to the blog Inside Facebook (full disclosure: I write for them), Spanish is Facebook’s second-biggest language after English, with 71.4 million users — recall that the total user base of that social network exceeds 500 million worldwide.

Twitter followed, with 32% of companies using an account and 53% of them having analyzed tweets about them, hinting that these companies are listening on social media platforms, they’re just not saying anything. Only 25% of the companies surveyed had YouTube accounts — mostly in Chile, Brazil and Mexico. Corporate blogs were the least used of all social media channels in the study.

So, in conclusion, Latin American companies need to step up. People are talking about you, but you’re not saying anything, so you’re letting your customers dictate the conversation which, in the long run, costs your image and costs you money.