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Survey Results: Social Media Budgets and Strategy 2011-2012

I decided to run this SocialNetConomy Survey on Social Media adoption and social media budget to understand where do we stand with social media adoption and understanding. And, most of all, what social media budgets have been for 2011 and what they are going to be for 2012.

Since Social media today are the talk of the town, whether you talk about Facebook with your friends or if you do a check-in in a place to show you travel and you go to fancy places (too often forgetting that your LinkedIn peers may not be interested to know where you go for dinner), or if you talk about social media during your business meeting, I thought it was good to understand how companies consider it.

I had a feeling not all companies truly understand how big the impact of social media can be and what kind of opportunity they are missing if they stay out of it.

I am glad to finally share results for my short survey – it was a 10-question survey. This survey has been realized using a free service (you can see the original survey on surveymonkey), and social media (I recruited people only on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

Thank You to all my Twitter peers that helped me with this survey- too many to mention!

A significant element of collecting responses has been the help I got from my twitter peers: I asked to ReTweet my survey to help me collect more responses, and thanks to all those who shared, retweeted and took the survey I am now able to share my results. I invite you to keep taking this survey, and sharing it. I will be happy to update this post if more responses come in.

Participants to this survey come from US, Canada, Latin America and EMEA. Not much from AP. Almost all industries are equally represented, including Government, Consulting, Manufacturing, Retail, Energy, Finance, Health and Pharma, and companies analyzed include both those operating globally and those operating in a single region, country or locally.

SocialNetConomy.com 2011-2012 Social Media Survey Results:

Q- Did you have a social media strategy and a dedicated budget in the past 12 months?

social media strategy and a dedicated budget in the past 12 months25% of surveyed companies said they did not have and they are currently planning any social media strategy. 12.5% said they did not have a social media strategy and they are not planning any.

Considering how I collected these answers, it’s interesting to notice that if they answered this survey, they got the link through a social network. Nevertheless, they do not consider this channel to be good for their brand exposure for some reason (inhibitors to Social Media adoption are part of this survey too). I believe this is pretty interesting.

Talking about budget, about 65% of respondents have a social media strategy (so they say), with more than half of them saying their budget is no more than $15,000. It’s interesting to notice that about 20% of respondents said their budget was over $15,000.

Q- If you have a social media strategy in place, please let us know which social networks are you currently using – up to August 2011

which social networks are you currently using - up to August 2011We discussed about this in my previous post: having a Facebook fan page does not mean having a social media strategy. It seems respondents are not always aware of this. In fact, not all social media are used the same way, and not all social media are used for their full potential (about half of those with a Facebook page use Facebook ads, not to mention LinkedIn PPCs are way less used – I suggest to follow the links to related posts to learn more about these PPCs). About half the interviewed companies use twitter and LinkedIn and have learned about the importance of a company blog.

Q. Please evaluate your current social media strategy

evaluate your current social media strategyThe next question was about the social media strategy effectiveness, which highlights something really important: While over 70% of respondents have a Facebook presence and half of them have Facebook ads, only 17% said this approach has revealed either “very effective” or “extremely effective”. The good news is there is a lot of room for improvements!

Ads on Facebook work better than Facebook pages (IMHO mainly because they are really well targeted), and company blogs, along with twitter and LinkedIn work very well too.

Bad performance for Groupon, LivingSocial and similar solutions, as well as for preliminary Google+ company pages.

A combination of all channels is surely highly recommended.

Q. How did you/ your company implement your Social Media strategy?

How did you/ your company implement your Social Media strategyI have over 10 years of experience in marketing and social media, and I believe (I have experienced) the right approach to social media would be to have it as part of both a business’ marketing strategy (you are telling something to your clients on their preferred channel!). and a customer service / channel with a direct contact with customers (they are now expecting it to be this way), for companies to listen to customers. What you write on social media stays and should be handled no less than a press release or TV ad: with care.

Given that I noticed a few companies don’t believe in social media, but they often do it because they have to, they don’t really pay attention to it, and they don’t care about who, what or when it’s done. So I asked who was taking care of social media to the surveyed companies. Results confirm there is a lack of cultural approach, but results are quite good. Some companies still give interns the ability to talk for their brands. Maybe the same companies have a strong “permission to quote” policy in place. I hope they’ll get the importance of social media soon. It’s not hard throwing out sentences on how good we are. The thing is, you must be quick, good, professional and nice to answer to those (who might be very influent with their peers) that are complaining about you or your products. It’s advertising, and some kind of reverse (or adverse!) advertising.

Another consideration: about half the companies are either using the marketing team or a digital team. Only half of them got it’s not a 1 person thing. Another possible answer was “Other”. I did not add it since it was about a 5% saying it was the owner doing it. Nobody answered with “everybody contributes, with a dedicated team (internal or external) to handle it strategically”. Which should be the right approach IMHO.

Q. Considering your past experience with social media, are you planning to increase your budget for social media in 2012?

are you planning to increase your budget for social media in 2012Survey results have highlighted a mixed feeling about social media, as demonstrated in the previous figures. I wanted to see if the situation was going to chance in the 2012 fiscal.

About 55% of companies are increasing their social media budget in 2012, and only between 2% and 3% are decreasing it. This is a very good sign, also given that this survey was running between August and October, and I have monitored it through the weeks and I can tell no crisis impact on this decision. This means only one simple thing: companies are getting it.

Q. Where are you placing your Social Media dollars in 2012?

Where are you placing your Social Media dollars in 2012With this question I wanted to understand “how much” companies are getting it. If they have learned what works, what does not, and how to improve their strategy.

And, of course, I wanted to know where their social media dollars were going to in 2012.

Again Facebook rules, but 10% of the surveyed companies are rather moving to other social networks and channels, more relevant for their business.

Answers to this question also provide some outlook for all those copanies developing Facebook pages, or editing videos, or for those agencies providing social media guidance and execution: 2012 will see their business flourish.

Again, no good news for Groupon and LivingSocial.

The last question of this short survey was about possible inhibitors to social media. I have noticed this is maybe the first time when a technology, used, developed and shared between consumers, get to the business world. usually with technology companies are the first large users, and then it becomes more common.

So why companies seem being so late to this (technology-based) date (on social media) with their clients?

Q. What have been/ are your company’s main inhibitors to social media adoption?

What have been/ are your company's main inhibitors to social media adoptionNo time for social media still tops the list of inhibitors (as found in many other surveys), and I keep wondering what should clients think of the fact that companies say they do not have time for their clients.

Interesting to notice that nobody selected “We had no issues”. So everybody had some kind of issues.

Other reasons such as lack of budget and lack of support from company execs are still among the main reasons.

In some circumstances companies admit lack of competences – as well as the fact that demonstrating ROI is pretty hard.

How do you compare with these results?

Related reading:

- More Than Facebook: The Time Is Right For Social Business – Forbes

- Social Media Marketing: social media is about BEING social, not about DOING social- SocialNetConomy

- Comparing Facebook, LinkedIn and Google PPC: Why Social PPC is best - SocialNetConomy

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+: who is using social media and what to expect from social media marketing in the future

There’s no day you open a news website or a printed newspaper and you do not find any article about social media or social networks. And increasingly, there are no talks with friends where you don’t mention the word “Facebook”, whether it’s about an event, a birthday or a photo album or some other gossip about your friends.

So, while the big giants of the web (unless you spent the past couple of weeks in a cave you should know I am talking about Facebook and Google) place their army on the two main buttons of your mouse, I started investigating how big is the social media effect on the business side of our life and what we should expect in the future.

Surely, when scrolling down the virtual wall of my Facebook friendsfeed, I can tell there is a huge Facebook penetration  in the business world (at least considering how active my friends are on commenting pictures and updating their status during their working hours). After all, if one every 6 minutes is spent on Facebook (according to ComScore’s research), some of those minutes must come from your office time. I heard someone bought an iPhone to stay on Facebook during office hours, after their company blocked access to it.

But, seriously: how big is Facebook penetration in today’s business? We all know big brands and large companies have a massive social media presence. But how many companies are really adopting social media as part of their strategy?

I found an interesting study on adoption of social links and plugins by the world’s 10000 largest websites. It provides a clear proof point we are just half way through the way that brings business close to their customers.

Less than 50% of the top 10000 websites have links to either of the two major social networks (Facebook and Twitter) on their front pages.

This gives us an interesting view of where we actually stand, what Social Media really is, and gives us room to understand what we should expect in the forthcoming months.

I believe we should take some little assumptions before moving ahead and get to the point:

  • Social media are about a new technology-based channel, and this is exactly how we should consider it.Social Media are not about a new marketing strategy.
  • While IT has become part of every company strategy, since it affects all units of a company, it seems social media (yet being substantially a “technology”), has not become part of the company strategy, though it’s about the company brand, and not just the number of fans on a facebook page. At least, this is true for about half the companies, it seems.
  • We need to consider Social Media’s users lifecycle like other technologies (please note the graph below has been authored in the 60’s by Everett Rogers) and we should keep in mind this is about SOCIAL, not only about media:

Rogers' bell curve

According to Rogers, who analyzed the technology adoption for farm practices, the adopters categories can be summarized as:

-          innovators – had larger farms, were more educated, more prosperous and more risk-oriented

-          early adopters – younger, more educated, tended to be community leaders

-          early majority – more conservative but open to new ideas, active in community and influence to neighbours

-          late majority – older, less educated, fairly conservative and less socially active

-          laggards – very conservative, had small farms and capital, oldest and least educated

We should of course consider those “less educated” companies in terms of being less educated in social networks.

We just miss another piece of information to understand what the possible future scenario can be: how old are today’s social media users? I found a nice infographic and took the numbers I needed from this analysis:

Keeping in mind what we just saw about the Rogers’ bell curve, the fact that LinkedIn users are usually older than Facebook and Twitter users, is another factor to keep in mind, and here is why:

-          traditionally, when talking about marketing, B2C marketing has been the one of the “early adopters”. Data confirm this theory for social media adoption by business brands: B2C companies are those topping the ist of most followed pages on Facebook and handles on twitter.

-         Interactions in the B2B business are those who likely happen in the senior executive level of companies: they are those taking decisions, they are those likely more “aged”, and they are those who we may likely consider being in the “late majority” and “laggards” portion of the “Rogers’ bell curve”, and they seem also those who have a higher presence on LinkedIn (the business network), which, in fact, has older users than the two most used social networks Twitter and Facebook.

Future scenarios for business: What shall we expect in the future of social media?

-          Social media marketing is all about building and increasing brand reputation while dealing directly with clients. To listen to them mainly, and to tell them also. This means increasingly, companies will centralize their brand strategies and integrate it with the company (marketing) strategy- which means social media strategy will call marketers and IT departments to talk more and more, like IT talks with company execs today.

-          B2B marketing will increasingly adopt the social media channel, and will likely develop a bigger presence on major social networks, including LinkedIn. This also means those companies operating in the B2B business will have to learn how to develop a “brand” strategy. The good news is B2B already knows how important is to “listen”.

-          LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter users will have a more similar average age.

-          Google+ and its pages for business will have a relevant impact on the social media marketing games and they have the huge potential of attracting those markets whose presence is not yet that high in social media.

Has The Job Market War on Social Networks Started?

One of the most interesting changes in the business world that all of us have experienced recently, with the booming of social networks, it’s surely the job market.

I had my first experience of how the job market was changing back in 1998 when I had my first job interview on a chat (it was for an internship in the first Italian online community and I ended up getting the job)- well before Facebook and LinkedIn changed the rules of the game!

Let’s see what’s new on the Job Market.

Raise your hand if you have a LinkedIn profile. Mine is here, in case you are curious to learn more about me. LinkedIn announced this year they surpassed 100 million users.

Incresingly, Headhunters and companies rely on LinkedIn to find their next talents. And having worked in the US for a while, I have to admit it’s quite surprising how often I got emails and messages with job offers while my location was “New York” (this doesn’t really happen that often in Europe, and now that my location is Milan, Italy).

Now, raise your hand if you have a professional profile (I mean like the one you have on LinkedIn) on Facebook.

Facebook's BranchOutNot many of you, I am sure, have the Facebook job App. Facebook’s Job app is called BranchOut and it recently went viral on the popular social network, as you can see from the figure above (Source: Inside Facebook). Nice work (allow me the expression) Facebook decided to have the app importing your LinkedIn data to have your profile ready in just a few clicks. A lot less work than the one required to fill in some job applications on some companies’ websites.

One of the things that I like the most of BranchOut is the ability to let you know who in your network is “closer” to a specific job post. And this is done in a much much nicer way than LinkedIn.

So, what happened to Monster.com? Before the job market moved to LinkedIn and (more recently and yet just a little) Facebook, Monster was “the” place for the job market.

Well: Monster is back! The company today announced through a press release they just launched a new Facebook app. BeKnown. If you can’t beat them, join them. This must have been the thought of Darko Dejanovic, global CIO and head of product at Monster Worldwide, who proudly spoke about the Monster-developed Social Referral Program (SRP) embedded in the facebook app, which encourages BeKnown users to pass along specific jobs through their BeKnown network. The Social Referral Program amplifies a company’s employee referral network and extends reach to passive candidates. Currently in beta, the referral program will be rolled out to select Monster customers.

We’ll see if BeKnown will go viral as BranchOut. And we’ll see if this app will really work well as Monster did in the past ;-)