A NEW SURVEY has found that Ryanair, Tesco and UPC are bottom of the pile when it comes to engaging with their online customers via social media.

Online consultancy firm AMAS, along with the Irish Internet Association, has examined the presence of features on the eCommerce sites of 100 companies and published the results in the latest State of the Net Bulletin. The features include a prompt to “Like” something on Facebook, to tweet about something or follow the company on Twitter, to view customer product reviews, or to view images of a product.

Tesco, Ryanair, UPC and Domino’s Pizza are among the businesses which feature none of the ten criteria set out in the survey, while a further 42 per cent had between one and three of the the ten social features the scores were based on. While no site scored full marks, among the best were Amazon and HMV, while the highest performing Irish site was Elverys. The sports retailer met six of the ten criteria.

Here’s how the main sites compare:

Image Amas.ie

State of the Net identifies that there is strong evidence that these features can improve customer loyalty and boost eCommerce revenues.

Aileen O’Toole, Managing Director of AMAS says “it’s surprising that a fifth of the businesses have no social media features at all on their sites – including some big guns such as Ryanair, Tesco and UPC”. O’Toole identifies that many online brands have Facebook and Twitter accounts, but for some reason have chosen not to promote their social media presence to their customers, while others only promote the ones likely to deliver the most benefits.

Read more from State of the Net: How sociable is eCommerce?>