The State of the Social Media Marketing Union Today

Welcome to another edition of social business unplugged, practical advice on how to leverage social media for your business. Now, the host of social business unplugged, author of the forthcoming book, maximize your social published by Wiley and founder of windmill networking. Neal Schaffer. Greetings, everybody and welcome to another edition of social business unplugged with Neal Schaffer. You know, I usually like to record these wherever I travel in the world. Last week, I was actually in Vienna, Austria, of all places, presenting to a group of technology transfer professionals on LinkedIn actually took the opportunity to just not stick with LinkedIn, but also look beyond LinkedIn, to Twitter, Google Plus, and even blogging. And I'd love to share the insight that I gave everybody there. But my feeling is in every country in the way they adopt social media and use it for businesses, obviously, at different speeds. I do believe that North America is currently in the lead in general, and that Europe, obviously depends on the country. But people that I was speaking with seem to be a little bit further behind a lot of interest in LinkedIn, obviously, Twitter, of the 250 professionals that I spoke with, I think only two or three actually tweeted during the event, although there was a hashtag. So obviously, Google Plus was the furthest thing from their mind. So that gives you a taste of the crowd that I spoke to. And it really represented all of Europe went out to dinner with the group, there was a gentleman from Slovenia, next to me, a gentleman from Malta on the other side, and what have you, but today, unfortunately, I'm back here home in Orange County, California. So not coming from an exotic location. But I wanted to talk about the 2013 social media marketing industry report put out by Michael Stelzner. And sponsored by the Social Media Examiner, this is the fifth year they've put out this report. And I think it provides a really, really good snapshot to people who are providing information to the report, there were 3000 marketers that were surveyed. And this is, like I said, the 50 year they've been doing it, I'd say, you know, HubSpot has a report of the state of inbound marketing where they offer a lot of data, I'd say that in this report are really two key reports that provide a lot of data based on feedback from actual marketers, as to how they're using social media, what questions they have and how they plan to use it in the future. So I just wanted to offer my own take on this. As I said, there were over 3000. Marketers, if you are curious as to the demographic, I think it's pretty representative of those that are using social media. A lot of my clients have never even heard of social media examiners, obviously, the people that are responding to this sort of survey are those that I expect are heavily using social media per se. Most of the survey participants 72% were between the ages of 30 and 59. I think that's pretty representative of the professional demographic, and 57% were based in the United States, followed by the UK at 9%, Canada, 7%. And Australia 5%. Maybe 57% from the US is a little bit high. But I still think it's a pretty good global representation. Looking at the traffic stats from windmill networking, my own blog, I'd say that's pretty representative, although India definitely would show up a little bit higher, as well as in the Netherlands and maybe Japan. But anyway, I think it's a pretty good round out of numbers. So first of all, the most interesting takeaway from this is the five social media questions that marketers wanted answered. And there were a number of takeaways I have that I want to share with you. The interesting thing is obviously my specialty is social media strategy consulting in my next book, maximize your social, we'll teach everybody how to create their own social media strategy. And the fifth most popular question that social media marketers had was, how do I create a social media strategy 83% of those that are engaged in social media that were questioned, actually don't know how to create a social media strategy. It's sort of worrying that, in essence, more than 80% of marketers that are engaging in social media don't really have a strategy. And because they don't have a strategy that sort of answers these other questions. So the third most popular question, how do I measure the ROI of my social media investment? 87% don't know how to do that not surprising, as all without a strategy. Without an objective, you can't really determine your ROI, can you and then the other things also sort of fall into place, which social tactics are most effective? was the number one question that was 90% of the people surveyed? One of the answer for 88% was how do I best engage with my audience? And then 84% Were looking for the best social management tools obviously, with a robust social media strategy that I'll be outlining and maximize your soul. I'll show it will really respond to all these five questions. But what also worries me not only the fact that only 17% of marketers feel that social media strategy creation is not a significant issue, but that 88% don't know how to engage that they don't understand the best ways to engage with your audience. 90% don't understand the tactics. And this is really worrying for a number of reasons. But the number one reason is if you're an active user of social media, and when I present on social media, I tell it to everybody, it is not rocket science. It's pretty natural, actually. Now, obviously, engaging, and tactics from a personal perspective and from a professional perspective are going to be different. But I think this is indicative of perhaps the people that are doing the social media marketing on behalf of their company, may not be as experienced in all the platforms, or maybe are relatively new, even though there were a number of people knew according to the demographics and the study, but not everybody. It's really surprising that that many people would want those questions answered, it really makes you see that a lot of the social media marketing you see out there is still at a very, I would call it an introductory stage. And that's maybe for a lot of companies, their social media program is sort of an oversight, you know, well, we got to do it, our competitors are doing it, let's do it, what have you. So really shocking that that's the current state of the union, as indicated in this report. Obviously, for those of us in the social media profession of helping companies, there's obviously huge upside a huge potential there. It also means that in the future, businesses are going to get a lot more savvy about using social media, and that we are still only at the very beginning of this very long journey that we will have ahead of us. Those were the five top questions that social media marketers wanted answered, I just want to talk about a few other data points here that I thought were interest, some will talk about quicker than others, obviously, of those that were surveyed, 97% are using social media to market their businesses. If you're one of the 3% that aren't, it's obviously you're missing out on a lot of the opportunity that many who are already using social media are obviously finding, and 97% indicated they're participating in social media marketing, and 86% of marketers said the social media was important to their businesses. So there's still that 11% that are doing it but don't see it's important yet, which I believe they will. But clearly those that are engaging in social media are already seen the benefit to their business. Now. The problem though, is what exactly is that benefit? I mentioned the statistic of all those people who weren't able to indicate the ROI of their programs. Here's a great stat of those that were asked, How do you measure your ROI for your social media activities? Only 26% were able to measure their social media activity. So once again, what are the 74% doing is really a scary thought there will be a day of reckoning a day of awakening, when bosses and executives are going to say, what is the ROI of everything that we do here, social media is not any different than any other channel out there. The same as the ROI of a press release or a website, the day will come when marketers are going to have to show what that ROI is, I believe if they want to continue to maintain their program, another interesting one was similar to how marketers aren't able to measure the ROI of their social media activities. The surprising thing was only 37% of those surveyed believed that their Facebook marketing was effective. Now, almost everybody surveyed is using Facebook for their marketing. So only 1/3 Feeling that Facebook is effective is really surprising, you know, raises two issues. Number one, is it possible to have effective Facebook marketing? I believe it is. But number two, if all these companies don't believe it's effective, what are they doing? And what are they trying to do? And how do they plan to improve that of all the social media platforms? I think there is as much information that can be out there pertaining to Facebook marketing, whether it's in books, or blogs, or a paid advertising platform that Facebook has that in a variety of ways can help businesses really leverage the presence. So this is another really headshaking. Well, head scratching is the better term their results. Here's another one. So I mentioned that I felt that most social media marketers just weren't spending enough time and trying to figure out the platforms because like I said, they're not rocket science. Here's one 17% of the marketers spend more than 20 hours each week on social media. If your job is social media, I would expect that you'd be spending a lot of time on social media. Now, within a social media position. You have internal reporting, you have content creation, you have analytics, there's obviously other things that you need to do. But 17% of marketers are spending more than half their time and social if you look at a 40 hour workweek. Why aren't 83% of marketers spending more time in the trenches? engaging with others, following others reading information, experimenting, trying to figure it out. And once again, I think, you know, not having a social media strategy, and just not having experience. As you know, social media is not like SEO, where you set it up and you follow it once a month. And, and everything goes it's it requires daily effort and daily activity. So it's a surprising number. But then again, considering all everything else that we see here, it's not surprising. Now, the benefits of social media marketing, this was very, very interesting that increased exposure was the number one answer at 89%, and increased traffic at 75%. But you would think that if you have increased exposure and increased traffic, it would lead to improve sales. The interesting thing was only 43% of those surveyed found that increased sales was a benefit of social media marketing. Now, there are intangible benefits. And it was actually a pleasant surprise, to see that 47% of those surveyed found that reduced marketing expenses was one of the main benefits. And this is something that I've always talked about that CEOs and executives speak the language of Excel. So if you're trying to create an objective and determine ROI KPIs, you know, it's either increased sales or decreased expenses, or it's going to be an intangible benefit, that's going to be very hard to calculate. And everybody looks at the increased sales, decreased expenses, I believe that social media can be equally important. Just going to talk about a few other things here. Let's look at the most commonly used social media platforms, this may be surprising the summit clearly, there are seven platforms that over 40% of those interviewed, responded to that they were using Facebook was number one at 92%. Twitter was number two at 80%. Twitter be number two does not surprise me at all. And I mentioned how I believe that Twitter is the hyper social connector of the b2b and b2c world. So that's sort of what I thought I would see LinkedIn be number three, blogging is already up to 58%. So once again, if your company hasn't started a blog, you don't see the benefits of it, you're obviously missing the boat here with so many of your peers that have already started a blog. And obviously, blogging and the benefits of blogging go beyond the scope of this podcast. But if you just go into women on networking, you'll, you'll find plenty of posts. And as I say, for every social media strategy that I create, a blog is always a centerpiece of that strategy. The interesting one that I thought was that YouTube was actually ahead of Google Plus. And Pinterest was almost as strong as Google Plus. Now YouTube obviously can be extremely beneficial companies, in a lot of ways, video being the most powerful medium video also requiring the most resources, I would say that Google Plus should be much higher, and I expect to see it much higher when they do this next year. And Pinterest, it was interesting at 41%, I thought that Pinterest would actually at this point be a lot higher. So although there's a lot of buzz about Pinterest, and Google Plus, if you're one of the 60% or so that haven't really engaged in it from a business perspective, you're not really late to the game. In fact, with social media, you're never late to the game with any platform. But hopefully, if you were trying to think about what platform should you do next, after Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn and blogging, a good reminder about YouTube, and then Google Plus, and Pinterest for the other surprising stat now for business to consumer, what was the number one choice of the social media platform that you'd use Facebook? Number one wasn't surprising? What surprised me that Pinterest was down there at number six, after blogging, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube, I thought that especially consumer facing brands, especially if you're an E commerce site, would find a lot of value from Pinterest, I assume that's going to continue in the future. For b2b, the surprising one, while I expected LinkedIn to be number one, what I didn't expect was that Facebook would be tied with LinkedIn at 29%. Is this a problem with the definition of b2b? Or is there a b2b side of Facebook that a lot of businesses haven't figured out? Or are businesses under leveraging LinkedIn as their number one site for b2b Social media marketing, and it's probably a combination of all of those. I'm going to end here with three more stats, the social media platforms that marketers want to learn more about, will it Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are the most common platforms. It goes to show that social media marketers already sort of get those platforms, even though all those people said they couldn't find their Facebook marketing effective, but I'll leave that for another podcast that blogging, and Google plus over 60% of those ask, those are the platform's they want to learn more about. So I'm going to do my best women on networking already as a great blogging blogger with Christy Hines, and Google Plus a blogger with Mark Traphagen. And I'm going to do my best to be able to share more about my own perspective of those two platforms as well. And then here's a good one, social media outsourcing. Many people who know me in my business know that I concentrate on social media strategy consulting, I do not do outsourcing and I do not believe philosophically that I should be doing so. Some media on behalf of brands. And what we're finding is that 74% of companies agree that social media should not be outsourced. And in fact, they're not outsourcing it. In fact, those that are being outsourced only 26%. That was 30% a year ago. So clearly the wave of the future is that companies want to do social media themselves and avoid the outsourcing the end. The interesting one, and this is the last step that I'm gonna share with you is that of those are outsourcing. The biggest aspect that they're outsourcing to third parties is design and development, with 15% of those being asked are outsourcing those tasks? That's not surprising if social media relies on engagement, social media relies on content, on strategy on analytics, and what have you. But you also need a lot of graphics, whether they're infographics or whether you set up pages, or photos that you want to create to help your Facebook or Pinterest postings go viral, or what have you. That design and development is really one area where you need creative and experienced professionals who know how to manipulate images to get that work done for you. All right. Well, my apologies if I sounded like I was blabbing during this podcast. Obviously, this report is a great report. It's 43 pages. I'm assuming it's available somewhere on social media examiner.com. It's a real eye opener to me to see, you know, over 3000 marketers, this is the State of the Union. And like I said, it's a surprising State of the Union, if you're still trying to figure social media out. And maybe as I was talking, you were nodding your head as I talked about the results. Well, you're not alone. And I guess that's a good thing to know. From my perspective, I just see a huge upside in helping businesses and professionals with their social media marketing. And I'm going to do even more to commit myself to that mission, both in the social business unplugged podcast, and on my blog women on networking.com. Thank you again, for listening. I appreciate your rating on iTunes. And once again, if there's any topic you want me to cover, please feel free to reach out to me, Neil at women networking.com Bye bye and make it a great day, everybody. Thanks for listening to another edition of social business unplugged. We appreciate your subscribing to our podcast. Please help us spread the word by sharing it on social media or adding your rating and comments in iTunes. If you would like to appear on the podcast or have content that you would like covered, please contact Neal Schaffer Neal at windmill networking.com Also please subscribe to the windmill networking blog on social media strategy at windmill networking.com Thanks again and make it a great day.