How many Fortune 500 companies blog?

Curious to know how many big companies have embraced blogging?

81 of the Fortune 500

This is less than I would have guessed. As a comparison, roughly twice as many companies on the Inc. 500 list have blogs — and I would say this is because smaller companies have fewer lawyers to advise against hosting blogs. Or, it could simply be that smaller companies stand to gain more from blogs than large established brands.

Also interesting is that more of these Fortune 500 companies Twitter than blog.

This data is from a report by Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, a professor and senior fellow at the Society for New Communications Research.

The report is free and you can download it here.

Key findings include:

• 81 of the Fortune 500 or 16% currently have public-facing blogs. This compares with 39 percent of the Inc. 500; 41 percent of the higher education sector and 57 percent of the nation’s Top 200 charities.
• 28 percent of the Fortune 500’s blogs link to Twitter accounts. (Other Fortune 500 companies have Twitter accounts, but they are not linked to their blogs)
• Five of the top ten companies have public blogs: Wal-Mart, Chevron, General Motors, Ford, and Bank of America.
• 90 percent of the Fortune 500’s blogs have the comments feature enabled.
• The computer software/hardware technology industry has the most blogs, followed by the food and drug industry, financial services,
• Internet services, semi-conductors, retail and automotive respectively.
• Ten percent of the Fortune 500’s blogs link to podcasts; 21 percent incorporate video

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John Yunker

John is co-founder of Byte Level Research and author of Think Outside the Country as well as 19 editions of The Web Globalization Report Card.

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