According to an IBM report, social media, despite being an under employed resource for customer interaction today in business, it will become dominant in the next 3-5 years.
The IBM survey focused on more than 1700 CEOs worldwide and was released in May 2012. The survey shows that only 16% of CEOs currently engage customers through social media. The change will happen in the next few years. Approximately, 57% of the CEOs who took the survey plan on moving to social media in the coming years.
If this proportion of businesses make the switch to social media as a customer engagement tool then it would place the channel behind only face-to-face methods of interaction, which are utilized by 67% of businesses. The growth of social media as a channel will likely steal from traditional media as a customer engagement channel.
SOURCE: IBM: https://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/en/c-suite/ceostudy2012/
