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The report concluded that British companies lag significantly behind their American peers, with Britains top performing company ranking just fourth on the global index, BP scraping into the top 10 and a total of four London-listed companies making the top 20.

Cisco presides at the top of the ranking with a score of 85.82, followed by Hewlett Packard and Citrix.

Technology companies account for eight of the top 10, with the London-listed energy giants Shell and BP the sole exceptions.

The UK is improving: the number of FTSE 100 companies that link from their websites to corporate social media accounts has more than doubled in the last three years, from 35pc to 72pc, although this is still some way behind the S&P 100s 89pc.

Just 5 companies in Londons biggest index, and none in the S&P 500, have no social media account for corporate communications at all.

But owning the Facebook pages and Twitter handles is not enough, the report found.

Companies that reply to Facebook posts have more than 16 times the number of likes than those that do not engage with Facebook users -- 52,544 compared to 3,317 -- while Twitter account that tweet more than 30 times a month have an average of 20,800 followers, eight times higher than the 2,546 followers of accounts that tweet less than once a day.

Businesses are no longer able safely to ignore social media as a means of communicating with their corporate and wider audience, the report said, mentioning moves from regulators such as the SEC in the United States and the FCA in the United Kingdom to rehaul their publishing guidance.

Numerous, high-profile incidents have demonstrated that when a company is not in control of its social media presence, the company is at risk: for some companies, the effect has been calamitous, the report said.

Last year, an official TfL Twitter account was forced to apologise after replying to a disgruntled commuter with the remark, "Leave early you will not be late next time", US Airways accidentally tweeted a link to a pornographic image, while a number of companies, from McDonald's to Mastercard, have had their marketing hashtags hijacked by Twitter users unwilling to play by the rules.

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