Alliance Relocation Services Social Media Survey Results

Written by Jenn…Your Community Manager

At Alliance Relocation Services we operate under a fairly simple, but important mantra: Seek First To Serve. We have been very interested in moving forward with technology and social media in order to create brand awareness and help to generate sales leads.  We wanted to first gauge where others are in this industry by creating a survey asking basic social media related questions.  We promoted the survey on various Relocation groups on Linked In, our Facebook Fan Page, our constant contact email list, and on our Twitter account for two weeks in June 2010.  Of course, May – October is the busy season for all moving industry professionals, but we did receive a great sampling of 126 responses.

What did we find?

Our 126 respondents were comprised of 33% Male and 67% female participants.   We were also told that 12% of all participants were not using Social Media whatsoever.   We expect this number to drop over time as Gen Y workers start to come up through the ranks.

Our thoughts were confirmed as well when 82% of all participants said that they use social media personally for friendships/relationships, 35% use it for the news, 53% use it for networking purposes, and 55% use it for entertainment.  A small 12% said that they do not use social media for personal reasons which corresponded with the same 12% that does not use social media whatsoever.

Purpose

The big focus for us was to find out if people are using social media for business purposes in the relocation industry and what we found is that they are, slightly.  For business use only 6% responded yes, and for both business and personal use the response was a significant 56%.

Alliance Relocation Services is attempting to be on all of the networks that it makes sense to be on.  When participating in social media  if your customers are not there then there is no sense in wasting your time on a medium that is not utilized.   We were not surprised to learn that the majority of users were on the big three networks, but were also evenly spread throughout smaller niche sites like Digg and Flickr:  (Click on all images to make them bigger)

How Did We Do It?

In order to get people to participate, we offered 5 $50 gift certificates to Best Buy which inherently made this a contest.  We were curious if any in relocation had participated in these styles of contests before and not surprisingly, many had not.  For Twitter 85% had never participated in a contest before and for Facebook 75% had never participated.   Although now having taken this survey, 100% can say that they have participated in at least one contest on line.

How Do People Define Social Media?

As is the case with many businesses and industries right now there is a big divide on what social media is, and that is evident here as well.  According to this survey 11% and 13% find social media to be a “waste of time” and a “fad” respectively, while a solid 58% consider social media to be a “useful business tool.”

With that being said, we inquired in what capacity do people use social media and it was a bit split across the board.  The highest percentage was 45% of participants acknowledging that social media fit best in a marketing department following closely behind with public relations (39%) and advertising (32%).  It should still be noted that 38% checked “I don’t use it” as an option which means there is plenty of room to grow.

What Did This Do For Alliance?

It gave us a place to start.  The participants stated that 74% were “unaware of any Alliance platforms” even though 14% came in from our Facebook Fan Page and 10% came in from Twitter.  More than half of the participants were from our constant contact email blast (52%) and 23% came in from other various methods.

What Does the Future Look Like?

We asked what people expected to be important in social media marketing within the next year and 39% expected blogging to be the biggest area followed closely behind with 38% expecting Microblogging (Twitter) and 36% for Online Communities.

One of the surprising and probably most telling of the whole survey was  that 0% of all participants expected social networks like Facebook and MySpace to be important.  This could come from MySpace’s continued downward spiral into being a music only site, and Facebook’s privacy concerns.

We also asked what participants expected to get out of social media.  And while 12% don’t use social media at all, and 56% use it for both personal and professional use, everyone is hoping to gain more for their business.  According to this survey 53% want to utilize social media in order to heighten company exposure, 41% want to create long lasting relationships, and 38% want to increase company sales.

Conclusion

Social Media is still very much a new tool for the relocation industry, but most are starting to accept it.  There is plenty of room to grow in this business and it is a welcoming environment in order to create company awareness, increase sales leads, network, build strong relationships, and collaborate on initiatives.

If you are a moving company, or any other entity in the relocation industry Alliance would be happy to help get you started on social media platforms.

Tags: contests, Relocation Ally, Social Media