Today Easynet Global Services and Ipanema (News - Alert) Technologies released a new report titled “KillerApps 2013.” The report shows statistics that reveal businesses are blocking fewer social media applications then they were last year.

The report’s statistics show that the number of CIOs and IT directors blocking Facebook (News - Alert) on their company computers dropped by 15 percent compared to 2012. Those blocking YouTube have fallen by 17 percent during the same period. However, the number of companies blocking access to LinkedIn (News - Alert) has increased by 3 percent.

“Social media offers great benefits for business so the trend of IT leaders to relax their controls is likely to be welcomed. The challenge for those IT departments now though is to ensure that social media traffic is managed effectively and the performance of business critical applications is guaranteed,” said Thierry Grenot, executive vice president at Ipanema Technologies. He continued: “An explosion in employees accessing YouTube (News - Alert) video or sharing photos across Facebook is likely to result in far greater demands being placed on company networks and there needs to be a way to prioritize the application traffic that really matters to user productivity,”.

Globally the report shows that instances of social media blocking are most common in the US market. In the U.S., 69 percent of companies restrict staff access to Facebook and 65 percent restrict access to YouTube.

Adrian Thirkill, COO and UK MD of Easynet Global Services, said, “Any application that delivers a productivity improvement, with a sound business case, must be adequately supported by the IT department. Social media is no exception. I’m encouraged that IT leaders are warming to social apps but I do expect some IT teams will now be taking challenging, retrospective measures to protect the performance of business critical systems like ERP, CRM or Unified Communications (News - Alert).” He continued: “We are committed to incorporating application visibility within our customer’s networks so they can understand what’s happening and how best to put pro-active measures in place that guarantee critical applications perform as necessary no matter how much secondary traffic the business generates.”