New figures from the Central Statistics Office show that use of social media by Irish enterprises was the second highest in the European Union in 2017.
The CSO said that 68% of Irish enterprises - employing 10 or more people - used some type of social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube compared with an average of 47% in the European Union.
Ireland was ranked joint-second - along with Denmark and the Netherlands - for use of social media by businesses, coming behind Malta's 74%. The CSO noted that Poland had the lowest usage at 27%.
Today's figures show the main way of using social media as a way of connecting with customers is the use of social networks, with 67% of Irish enterprises stating they used social networks such as Facebook.
This is an increase from the 65% and 62% of Irish enterprises using social networks in 2016 and 2015 respectively.
The use of social networks by EU-28 enterprises increased from 36% in 2015 to 42% in 2016 and 45% in 2017.
Today's CSO figures also show that 58% of large enterprises in Ireland had e-commerce sales which accounted for 43% of total sales of such enterprises.
Just under 29% of small enterprises had e-commerce sales which accounted for 22% of all sales, while over 51% of medium sized enterprises had e-Commerce sales which accounted for 24% of their total sales.
Meanwhile, 34% of Irish enterprises used Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to capture, store and make available to other business functions information about its clients for marketing purposes.
The EU-28 average was 33%.
