A report from analyst firm IDC highlights the adoption of social media as an emerging technology across six major vertical markets: banking, government, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and utilities.

Part of IDC's annual vertical view survey, the study found that similar to Internet adoption in the 1990’s, B2C companies - especially retailers - are driving social media adoption while B2B companies lag behind.

The report also found that social media is enabling organisations to increase productivity and improve knowledge sharing as they leverage social networks to share best practices and identify appropriate resources. The report showed that marketing is the biggest user of social media and is driving the purchasing decision of these technologies and respondents cited managing and tracking all posted content as the top challenge.

"Industries that are consumer focused such as communications, media and recreational services are spending a larger percentage of their IT budget on social media as it is easy for them to make the shift to adopting the way consumers communicate," says Eileen Smith an IDC program manager.

"However, there are early adopters in vertical markets such as insurance and professional services. Emerging uses in the construction industry for instance demonstrate how B2B organisations can leverage social media as a powerful collaboration tool to share project and material data, submit bids and review designs.”