Social Media as a Marketing tool is still quite new with people still trying to work out optimum expenditure on the medium and discussing the probability of fixing analytics on the medium. How much impact does a Tweet make? What’s the return on investment? We recently did an article on social media and brand reputation. Earlier, emarketer has published a report about how 59% of marketers in the USA already use Social media with a projected 87% planning to use it by the next year. Recently, there was also an article by Mashable about how around two-thirds of marketers were using social media, and this report supports that estimate.
The most popular mediums exploited in social media were Facebook, Videos, Blogs and of course, Twitter. As we mentioned in this study, Twitter is quite popular as a marketing tool, which probably explains part of why ages around 35 actually consider it useful.
The graph below is quite self-explanatory. Marketers were asked to explain the perceived barriers surrounding social media as a marketing tool.
What is remarkable is that most ad agencies are also quite unaware of social media as a medium and how to start utilizing it – 37% among brand marketing and 31% among ad agencies. Also surprising is the reluctance of ad agencies to use social media and the apprehensiveness surrounding it as an untried medium.
Since a lot of brand outreach is measured in Cost per Impression, developing exact analytics for each medium is naturally difficult.
In terms of exact methods of using social media, tracking website hits, links, mentions and leads is still the most popular form. Measuring the “buzz” factor is probably the most important part of any social media campaign, and the focus is not as high as it could be. Just 14% of brand marketers and 12% of agency marketers reported not measuring social media efforts at all.
Another point to be observed in the first graph is that among marketers and agencies that did not use social media, one would have expected people to write off social media as a waste of an employee’s time. Surprisingly, that number is in a minority, with a majority of them not knowing about it or not knowing exactly how to use it. Companies in India are also becoming increasingly aware of social media, our estimate of the digital marketing scene in India is here in this article.
