I have blogged before about the use of social media by utilties to communicate with the public. Colorado Springs Utilties used Facebook during the Colorado forest fires to keep people apprised of the status of the fires. As another example, Southern California Edison (@socaledison) uses Twitter to report extreme weather alerts, outages, and restoration progress.
At the EDIST 2013 Conference in Toronto there were two presentation that focussed on social media, primarily for customer interaction management. But utilities are just beginning scratch the surface in this area, so the talks were intended to make the audience aware of just how pervasive social media has become.
Facebook
FB has a billion users. If it were a country, FB would be the third largest. Half of the users use mobile devices. The average user spends 5 hours a week on FB. FB supports 70 languages. FB users used to be primarily a younger crowd, but the older age groups are now growing faster. There are about an equal number of male and female users. For the Canadians out there, apparently Tim Hortons has 2 million "friends" on FB.
Twitter
140 million active users, 55% of them women. 41% of users use smartphones to tweet.
Youtube
Youtube has become the 2nd largest search engine, after Google.
Pinterest
25 million users, 72% of them women.
These are very impressive statistics, and the clear message is that in this time of the smart grid and in that context the much greater importance of the customer relationship utilities need to prioritize the development of a social media strategy.
At the EDIST 2013 Conference in Toronto there were two presentation that focussed on social media, primarily for customer interaction management. But utilities are just beginning scratch the surface in this area, so the talks were intended to make the audience aware of just how pervasive social media has become.
FB has a billion users. If it were a country, FB would be the third largest. Half of the users use mobile devices. The average user spends 5 hours a week on FB. FB supports 70 languages. FB users used to be primarily a younger crowd, but the older age groups are now growing faster. There are about an equal number of male and female users. For the Canadians out there, apparently Tim Hortons has 2 million "friends" on FB.
140 million active users, 55% of them women. 41% of users use smartphones to tweet.
Youtube
Youtube has become the 2nd largest search engine, after Google.
25 million users, 72% of them women.
These are very impressive statistics, and the clear message is that in this time of the smart grid and in that context the much greater importance of the customer relationship utilities need to prioritize the development of a social media strategy.
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