While there are more than 800 million Facebook users and hundreds of millions of Twitter users, businesses have initially been slow to follow their customers.

Now, they are starting to get into the act.

Beverage giant Coca-Cola engages actively with their 36 million fans on Facebook while private banking firm Coutts has started to respond to some high-end customers’ Tweets almost instantly.

Whereas social media is used to be seen as the preserve of the young, it has gone mainstream and the thousands of people of all ages using the media can make or break a company.

Here in Singapore, for example, companies ranging from Burger King promoting chicken sandwiches to Brewerkz promoting beer are meeting their customers on Facebook or Twitter.

Even the Singapore Police Force has gone onto Facebook and now has over 189,000 Likes.

Game changer

In the past some executives may have thought social media as “fluffy, youth-focused concoctions with more empty calories than real content”, as Accenture described it.

Now the consulting firm is singing a different tune, calling social media a genuine game changer for business and digital analyst Brian Solis says social media is clearly becoming the “new normal.”

Companies in other countries have seen the benefits of social media, using it to reach more customers at lower cost.

Pepsi replaced its Super Bowl ads with a $20 million dollar social media campaign. And research firm Allegiance says Dominos Pizza used social media to grow its global profits by US$23 million.

Corporate social media

Even though hundreds of thousands of Singaporeans are active on social media, companies here lag the region.

A 2011 study by Burson-Marsteller found that “Singapore still lags most other markets in the region in terms of corporate adoption of social media” and online dialogue is

As one example, it said Singtel posted an apology about a service outage on Facebook but didn’t respond to the 300 comments it received.

That low corporate usage is a distinct contrast to how individual Singaporeans use it. Experian Hitwise ranked Singaporeans the second most active users of social networking in the world this year, and Comscore put Singapore among the top 10 Twitter users globally.

With such high usage by individuals, a few organisations in Singapore have realised the power of social media and started using it to their advantage.

Burger King posted a series of videos on YouTube as part of its You’ll Never Chicken Out campaign, for example, and one of the segments attracted over 40,000 views within a week.

Smaller Singapore brands have also started using social media with great success.

Research by Firefly Millward Brown, reported in the Straits Times, showed that social media users in Singapore put small local firms like yoghurt chain Soghurt and grooming firm Juup Nails together with Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Adidas in terms of brand recognition because of their social media campaigns.

Non-profits

Even non-profits have seen the power of social media. Animal protection non-profit ACRES gained vast publicity – and a rebuke from Resorts World Sentosa (RWS), for a “cyber-attack” – when it posted messages on RWS’ Facebook page as part of its campaign for the release of captive dolphins.

If companies don’t use social media well and garner negative publicity, on the other hand, the impact can be severe.

Research by Symantec found that lost revenue, lower brand value and other problems can cost a company more than US$4 million in the 12 months after a negative social media incident.

Presence online

After seeing the power of social media for marketing and branding, more companies here are finally starting to hire staff and engage consultants to manage their social media presence.

Along with hiring social media managers directly, they advertise online. Recruitment firm JobStreet recently had advertisements for more than 200 social media jobs, ranging from software engineers to marketers and even secretaries who could handle Facebook.

Consultants ranging from big firms like Accenture Interactive to small ones like Cannla are also helping companies manage social media.

And even though many marketing professionals here say they still prefer traditional media, preferences are changing.

The State of Marketing Singapore Industry Report 2011 found that 66 per cent of respondents increased their marketing budgets for social media in 2011 and “a whopping 83% of the survey respondents agreed that social media is effective for marketing”.

As Clicktrue intern Cassandra Aw said, companies in Singapore “risk being sidelined if they don't engage consumers in social media".

While the take-up may have been slow initially and still hasn’t reached mammoth proportions, more companies are finally using everything from Facebook and Twitter to Skype, and they’re starting to make up for lost time.

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