According to a recent survey conducted by the UK arm of Avanade, an Accenture-Microsoft joint venture, Facebook is almost twice as popular as SharePoint with 74% of companies using it as a social media tool, against 39% using SharePoint.
The survey, which polled 1,000 IT professionals and 4,000 users across 22 countries, showed that companies plan to enrol in enterprise social media technologies in the next year with Salesforce Chatter and Microsoft SharePoint listed as a top priority.
Andy Hutchins, director for content and collaboration at Avanade UK, commented that organisations are beginning to realise that they should take social media more seriously and will eventually start doing something with it.
Over 80% of the companies that use social media, plan to use it even more in the future. Among the advantages of social media is the fact that it makes employees more productive, it helps them to get their jobs done faster and seems to make them enjoy their work more. But, at the same time, a quarter of employers are concerned that social collaboration tools encourage workers to waste time and distracts them from their job.
Almost 88% of enterprises use web-based social media technology in their workplace, but the vast majority of them do not integrate it into their IT platforms. Hutchins commented that the availability of social media tools does not always bring business value and there is a false sense of accomplishment. Insufficient training of employees combined with a lack of IT resources is the biggest issue when using social media, according to 26% of the participants in the survey.