Retailers Love Facebook and Twitter

I must say I was shocked to read on eMarketer , that a combined 99% of surveyed online retailers currently employ (86%) or plan to employ (13%) Facebook Fan Pages. Doesn’t that number seem a little high to anyone?

eMarketer got the numbers from a “Community and Social Media Study”. In addition to the high Facebook numbers, I was surprised to see that that only 55% of online retailers surveyed have blogs, but 65% have Twitter accounts or plan to be on twitter (26%).

So if my math is right, online retailers are saying that 99% they will be on Facebook and 91% will be on Twitter.

So why rush to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter? Well according to the report, “One of their biggest fears was that customers would abandon their site in favor of one that was more socially engaging.” In response to this fear, retailers are actively adopting social media tools over adding social utilities like a blog, Facebook Connect (43% use today), or forums (27%) to their own sites.

So basically retailers are saying, we are afraid that shoppers will go elsewhere if we don’t have anything that is socially engaging on our site. So if we have Facebook pages and Twitter accounts then we can say we are in the game. Whether they know how to play the game is a whole other post.