Twitter’s adoption rate may be leveling off for now, but the microblogging revolution has created a basic shift in how consumers and brands interact through digital media.

Still, many companies may have yet to embrace and leverage the conversation happening to them and about their brands online, particularly on Twitter.

To learn more about how big companies are approaching the virtual cocktail party, Weber Shandwick conducted research to evaluate how effectively Fortune 100 companies use Twitter to its full potential as an engagement platform. (NOTE: You can download the full white paper here.)

The findings are quite compelling:

  • 73 percent of Fortune 100 companies registered a total of 540 Twitter accounts.

  • 76 percent of those accounts did not post tweets very often
  • 53 percent of the accounts did not display personality, or a consistent tone/voice
  • 52 percent were not actively engaged
  • 50 percent of the Fortune 100 accounts had fewer than 500 followers
  • 15 percent were inactive; of those, 11 percent were merely placeholder accounts
  • 4 percent were abandoned after being used for a specific event.

Weber Shandwick prescribes five basic, but essential steps for Fortune 100 companies to start to create true engagement and market interaction on Twitter:

  1. Listen to conversations.

  2. Participate in conversations.
  3. Update frequently with valuable information.
  4. Reply to people who talk about issues that are important to your company.
  5. Retweet relevant conversations.

To read more, you can download a full copy of the white paper here, or you can grab a copy to embed below:

Do Fortune 100 companies need a Twitter-vention? (Weber Shandwick)

Please let us know what you think!

- Daniel B. Honigman and Greg Swan