Social Media Overload: Enterprise Companies Average 178 Company-Owned Accounts

This may sound familiar: You’re active on Twitter and Facebook, and you’re trying to keep up with Google+ while also keeping your blog active and making sure your LinkedIn profile is up-to-date. You post some photos on Flickr every now and then, and you have a feeling you should really be checking out Pinterest right about now.

You may think you have a bad case of social media overload, but you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Enterprise-level corporations — those with 1,000 or more employees — are managing an average of 178 company-owned social media accounts each. Ouch!

The numbers come from a new Altimeter Group report that Jay Baer wrote about today called A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation.

Altimeter surveyed 140 major companies in Q2 of 2011 and found that they average 178 social accounts each — that includes company accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networking sites, as well as company blogs and accounts on forums.

It doesn’t include employee accounts, nor does it include Google+ accounts. Those weren’t available to companies in Q2 2011, but are available now — and we recently reported that 77 of the top 100 brands now have Google+ pages, so the social media overload problem is likely getting worse for many of these companies.

The Altimeter study also found that only 48% of the companies surveyed have a coordinated approach to managing all these social media accounts. Despite the overload, though, 70% of the respondents said that social media marketing efforts are helping them meet business objectives.

You can see the full report on Slideshare.

(Stock image via Shutterstock. Used under license.)