In this new age of digital communication it appears that Irish businesses lead the way with the use of a formal social media policy according to new figures released by the EU’s statistics agency Eurostat. Ireland has the highest percentage of businesses surveyed for the report.
According to Eurostat,as much as 20% of Irish enterprises have a formal digital marketing policy, compared with an EU average of just 8%, and 18% in the Netherlands, 17% in Cyprus, and 16% in Denmark. In nineteen Member States, the share was below 10%.
The same study also found that 48 % of Irish companies use at least one form of social media to communicate with its target audience. This is the third highest in the EU, only trailing Malta (55%) and the Netherlands (50%).
Three-quarters of Irish companies have websites, above the EU average of 73%, with Finland the best performer in this category at 94%, followed by Denmark with 92%.
Looking at specific types of social media, 28% of enterprises in the EU28 (28 members of the European Union) used social networks such as Facebook in 2013; 11% multi-media content sharing websites such as YouTube; 10% blogs or micro blogs such as Twitter and 6% wiki-based knowledge-sharing tools.