Social Media - Survey Results

The expansion of marketing into the Internet landscape and the rapid adaptive waves of social networking into that niche brought marketers to realize there is great power in social media “word of mouth” marketing.

But the question remains - How can you use social media marketing for your business effectively?

I was part of a Marketing Research class team in the University of California Berkeley Extension’s Marketing Certificate Program. Our team launched a Social Media Marketing Survey and performed extensive marketing research to support the results. In this post I will summarize our key findings as well as share the relevant data we found.

The short version answer to the former question is –
Social media is a good tool for brand promotion, for community growth and for initial marketing research. The top three channels that are used are: Facebook, blogs & YouTube. Blogs are the ones that are considered as generating the most business followed by videos. (Channel use is different between B2B and B2C).

Investment in social media varies by business type and size. Small businesses invest less in social media channels vs. medium and large businesses. B2Bs invest more than B2Cs in paid advertising although research shows that the trend will be rising in 2009. ROI remains unclear, especially in ‘hard business’ categories. Part of the reason is that social media is a new field for marketers; most respondents said they have being using it for less than two years.


Our Survey and Sources -

We got 65 completed surveys and 27 partial surveys. The survey demographics ranged to different industries with 21% respondents from Art, Entertainment & Recreation Industry, 21% from Information industry (Internet, Telecommunication), 12% Hightech, 10% PR and Marketing.

Since our sample was relatively small, we performed extenssive data minning to back up our survey results. One of the sources we used was Marketing Sherpa Social Media Benchmark Guid for 2009, Which Sampled 1,186 marketing proffecionals. You can see a complete list of our sources attached at the end of this post.

Social media as a two way communication approach

We asked people what is the closest definition to social media. The majority of survey takers (51/83 = 61.44%) believe that social media is a two way communication approach aimed at sharing information and creating discussion. Meaning, more businesses understand that social media is not just another advertising tool. In order to make it effective, you have to be willing to share your knowledge. The knowledge you share should be valuable to others and not just a summary of what is already known to them.

Social Media is good for Brand Promotion

We asked people what they think social media is good for. They answered Brand awareness and Brand perception. Then we asked them what growth did their company actually experienced as a direct result of social media marketing. The answers were: growth in Brand awareness and Customer engagement. According to Awareness survey the main reasons why organizations use social media are to increase their brand promotion, customer engagement and driving marketing programs.


Social media is good for initial marketing research

Use social media to get a pulse of the market trends and improve your business accordingly.

We asked “Did you make any changes due to feedback received from social media? “ more than 50% of respondents said they did, another 25% said they are considering making changes.

We asked “Where do you receive the most client feedback from, is it from social media channels or from traditional marketing channels?” 39% said traditional channels are their main source of feedback Vs 24% for social media channels. 20% are unsure and the rest said the proportion is similar to both.

B2Bs are ahead when it comes to implementing social media.

Interestingly, when we broke down the former question results by business type we found that B2Bs are ahead when it comes to implementing social media. 37% of B2Bs said they receive their feedback more from social media channels VS only 9% in B2Cs. When we analyzed the “I am not sure about the proportion” answers we found that 29% of those who answered “Im not sure about the proportions” were B2Cs VS only 5% of B2Bs.

ROI Remains Unclear, especially in “hard business” categories

We noticed that the categories we call the “soft” categories of social media” (Brand Awareness, Community growth, Customers engagement, and Consumers loyalty) ranked high on growth while the “hard business” categories (Profit and Sales) ranked low. Also, more people answered “I don’t know” in the “hard business” categories than in the “soft” ones. These results suggest that people are not sure about how to measure social media marketing effectiveness in categories like sales and profit and they seem to have better understanding of the intangible benefits.

We asked people: “What percentage of your marketing budget goes towards social media channels? “ (This includes any fees you pay for advertising in social media, for creating and maintaining your media channels and for creating the content in case it did not exist prior to your social media presence)Then we asked “What percentage of your business comes from social media channels?” The results were: an average of 20% out of the marketing budget goes to social media investment in channels Vs an average of 16% for return.

The survey results show that the ROI is negative. However, we received a lot of “I don’t know” answers and we got a very low response rate for this specific question. We believe that the main reason is that social media is a relatively new field. Most of survey respondents said they have been using social media for 2 years or less. It is also may be too early to measure the return since companies are just now establishing their social presence. The return may take a while to show.

According to Marketing Sherpa Social Media Benchmark Report for 2009: The top two categories for marketing budget increase in 2009 are social media (networks & blogs) with an increase of 48% and emailing to house lists, an increase of 48%. They also found that social media marketing (SMM) budgets range in 2009 are: more than $100,000 for enterprise-class businesses, $10,000 - $99,000 for medium businesses and under $10,000 for small. Costs such as salaries, consultant fees, in-house graphic work and perhaps in-house IT application programming are taken into effect.

The top three channels professionals are using for their business are: Facebook, Blog, YouTube. Blogs are considered to generate the most business.

According to the Institute for Public Relations and a study released in 2007 by Katie Delahaye Paine, a blog is created about once every two seconds and new videoa are posted to YouTube with more frequency. We asked people “Which channel generates the most business for you?” and also - “What kind of content do you use for your social media channels?” The answers indicated people are using blogs the most. We believe that blogs serves as the main source of content which then feeds the rest of the channels. It is a good place to start with when establishing your social media presence.

Who investment in SMM?

Paid advertising is utilized more in B2C than B2B. 73% of respondents do not use paid advertising. 67% of those who do are B2Cs. Small businesses invest less in social media then medium or large businesses respectively. When asked How much do you invest in SMM (as a % of your marketing budget)? The majority of small business said they invest between 0-1%, medium business said 1-5% and large said 1-5% and more than 5%.

For the full report, source list and researchers bios download the attached PDF document (scroll down to download).