Here’s how your colleagues use social media
Here’s the scoop on what your colleagues are thinking and doing with social media.
How does this align with your thinking?
Social Media Examiner just released a 50 page report with 70 charts based on responses from 2,800 of your fellow marketers about how they use social media to grow their business. The full 2014 Social Media Marketing Industry Report is available for free until the end of May.
Highlights
- Marketers feel the 3 top benefits of social media marketing are increasing exposure, increasing traffic, and building loyal fans. Here’s the full list of what marketers are getting out of time invested in social media:
- Marketers place very high value on social media: 92% of marketers indicate that social media is important for their business
- Email marketing; search engine optimization; and event marketing lead the list of “other” forms of marketing your peers use
- Facebook and LinkedIn are the two most important social networks for marketers. When forced to only select one platform, 54% of marketers selected Facebook, followed by LinkedIn at 17%
- 64% of marketers are using social media for 6 hours or more
- Only 43% of marketers feel like their Facebook efforts are working (ouch!)
- The number-one question marketers want answered (91%) is which tactics work best. This high number is likely in response to the constant changes taking place across many social networks
- If you’re using paid social media, you’re doing it mostly on Facebook (90%), Twitter (20%) and LinkedIn (17%)
- If you’re outsourcing social media, you’re most likely outsourcing the design and development, content creation, and analytics
- Even with the wild success of content curation sites like ViralNova, Wimp, Upworthy, and Buzzfeed, marketers place the highest important on creating original content (65% think it’s important) versus only 10% that place importance on curation of others content, which is the Buzzfeed model
What’s next?
- Marketers plan on increasing their use of blogging (68%), YouTube (67%), Twitter (67%), LinkedIn (64%) and Facebook (64%), in that order
- Marketers plan to increase their use of original written content (81%), original videos (73%), original visuals assets (like infographics) (70%), curation of other people’s content (46%) and original audio (33%), in that order
- Podcasting is on a growth trajectory. Snapchat is not. 21% of your colleagues plan on investing more into Podcasting this coming year, up from only 6% last year, while 85% have no plans to spend time with Snapchat
