Not so long ago, twittering was only done by elderly ladies drinking tea with their next door neighbors. These days twitter and similar social networking sites like Facebook have become an international obsession among the young and the restless. Which is very good apart from recent reports that state that twittering or facebooking is costing UK businesses close to one and half billion pounds in the last twelve months. How someone managed to come up with such a figure remains to be seen, but it seems that many of the younger employees of the UK financial juggernauts are spending hours interacting socially online instead of doing their jobs properly.

Tweeter lovers, in their defence, hasten to point out a particular anomaly. That is while even the largest UK companies are employing people to investigate the huge marketing possibilities that social networking sites generate especially among the less debt burdened, mortgage free sector of society, namely the under thirties, the same people are actively discouraging them from using the same facilities. The problem is more complex, as the traditional methods used to block employees from visiting certain sites is no longer viable i.e. blocking them. Nowadays, just about any young surfer worth their salt has his own mobile phone on which they can twitter all day long with nobody knowing the difference.

In a recent survey carried out among 1600 young people employed in private sector who were under the age of thirty, 57 percent of them admitted that they spent an average of 8 minutes a day on these sites, during work hours. While this may sound petty, when taken to its maximum possibility, the equation means that £1.35 billion pounds of employer’s time is being twittered down the toilet.

In addition, some of the UK’s major retailers and service providers have been forced to deal with customer complaints after they discovered that company employees were twittering abusive messages, usually about their appearance. How they discovered this abuse remains unknown.

Either way, employers and employees will be required to find some common ground in dealing with the issue of twittering in the workplace. In the meantime, more than three quarters of the people who took part in the survey had not been issued with specific guidelines regarding the use of Twitter and Facebook.

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Tags: British Economy, Economy, Employment, facebook, Financial News, marketing, Money, social networking, twitter, twittering, UK businesses, UK Economy