MarketingProfs recently released their latest State of Social Media report in which they scrutinise how marketing professionals are using social media tactics to reach their marketing goals. To compile the 240 page report MarketingProfs surveyed over 5100 MarketingProfs members representing more than 40 industry verticals.
Some of the objectives of the report include determining the rate of social media adoption among brands, the true cost of social media for brands (including salaries), how marketers use social media tactics as well as how marketers determine social media benchmarks.
The report is divided in three sections namely:
- What companies are doing in terms of social media
- What social media tactics individual marketers are using
- How consumers are using social media
According to Roy Young, President of MarketingProfs “our findings have clearly shown that the way information digitally travels has fundamentally changed marketing from a media perspective.” Some of the report’s key findings include:
- More than half of the marketers surveyed indicated they use social media for work purposes yet only 15% reported that blogging and social networking are included in their job descriptions
- More than 50% of the respondents reported that their brand maintains a corporate profile on one or more social networks with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (in that order) being the most popular
- Marketers’ objectives for Twitter include driving sales by linking to promotional web pages and driving website traffic by linking to marketing pages
- Objectives for Facebook include driving traffic to marketing-related pages via status updates and “befriending” recent customers with corporate Facebook profiles
- 50.8% of those surveyed said they monitor Twitter for real-time PR problems and 74.8% reported that it “worked great” or “worked a little”
- 25% have utilised user data available on Facebook to profile customers based on demographics and interests and 72.3% reported that it “worked great” or “worked a little”
- 24.6% said they have created a Facebook application around a brand and 73.3 reported it “worked great” or “worked a little”
According to MarketingProfs brands that make use of the following tactics have a higher social media campaign failure rate:
- Brands that don’t engage with followers and fans and only use social media profiles to push out marketing messages by continually dumping promotional links
- Brands that make use of Twitter auto-responders and not follow new followers back and actively engage with followers
- Brands that see social media only as a short-term solution
From this we can conclude that brands that have a well thought-through social media strategy in place, engage with fans and followers and offer content of value are those that see a ROI from their social media efforts. Read more about the report on SocialMediaExaminer.com and Yahoo.com.
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