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Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing: Managing and Measuring Social

in association with Adobe

Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing: Managing and Measuring Social in association with Adobe

Econsultancy London

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Copyright © Econsultancy.com Ltd 2012

Published September 2012


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Contents

1. Foreword by Adobe .......................................................... 4

2. Not just a branding awareness channel; social permeates the whole enterprise ...................................... 5

3. Social KPIs can be business KPIs... and they should be ...................................................................................... 9

4. Social ROI doesn’t end at direct sales ........................... 12

5. Marketing attribution: understanding the helping role of social ................................................................... 14

6. Failure to use social data within enterprises to optimize marketing ........................................................ 16

7. Integration needs knowledge... knowledge needs data... data needs tech ................................................... 19

8. The role of technology… and where it can fall short ..... 21

9. Your audience is complex, so is your social landscape . 24

10. Punching above its weight: social still a small direct investment ..................................................................... 26

11. Appendix: Respondent profiles ..................................... 28

11.1. Geography ............................................................................... 29

11.2. Business sector ........................................................................ 30

11.3. Business focus .......................................................................... 31

11.4. Size of company by revenue .................................................... 32




1. Foreword by Adobe For this edition of the Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing we decided to examine the trends for

managing and measuring the business value of social media. We wanted to get a snapshot of

social media uses, challenges and needs from companies today.

Many articles in the press cover the challenges in measuring the true business value of social

media… or seek to suggest that social isn’t proving to have much value at all. On the other hand,

some companies claim to be very successful in leveraging the vast engagement opportunities of

social to the benefit of their bottom line.

We asked if and how social is being used across departments. We inquired about how companies

are setting goals and measuring the results of social media. And, most importantly, we probed to

see if companies think they can determine the impact of social on their business.

The results of this survey represent the input of over 650 marketing professionals from agencies

and the client-side; a near-equal mix of B2C and B2B across industries in North America and

Europe.

It is clear both from this survey and other research, as well as our own work with clients and

partners, that the social space is maturing. Companies are recognizing that social media plays a

key role not just for brand awareness, but across marketing and other areas. Social is playing a

more significant role within decision making, and indeed over two-thirds of businesses,

regardless of size, view it as integral to the marketing mix.

However, social marketers are recognizing that they cannot rely merely on results focused on

fans, followers and top level sentiment.

Those are still foundational, but to have long-term and meaningful significance, mature social

media is about customer segmentation, multi-channel integration and business impact.

It’s also very clear from this survey that there is definitely a need in the market to better manage

and measure social media efforts. Nearly 70% of respondents believe that social media needs to

be more rooted in data, but less than 25% are leveraging social data to optimize their marketing

strategies. To truly measure social ROI, companies need to map their social efforts to their

business objectives. A holistic approach, focused on engagement and impact on the bottom line,

but also taking in to account volume and brand health is needed. At most organizations it appears

that one of the greatest challenges to this occurring is getting the right tools and techniques in

place, backed up by the right resources.

I’m pleased to announce that Adobe® Social, now generally available, was built to address the

market needs so clearly identified in these findings. It provides a way to efficiently and directly

the measure impact of social marketing endeavors, through a single suite of social applications

that also integrates with the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, to give an end to end approach to

creation, measurement and optimization of social strategy.

We look forward to bringing you more of these briefings in the future and to working with you to

take the guesswork out of social media.

Craig Stoe

Director of Social Product Management

Adobe




2. Not just a branding awareness channel;

social permeates the whole enterprise The nature of social media, changes in consumer behavior and their impact on business mean

that ‘social’ has always been more than a discrete channel for marketing. Rather than something

which can be pinned down to a particular role or purpose, its versatility and ubiquity mean that

social can (and often should) permeate the whole business.

As part of this research, we surveyed1 more than 650 in-company (in-house) and agency

marketers about a range of social-related topics, including what they saw as the two most

important roles for social within their own or their clients’ businesses.

As Figure 1 indicates, social is predominantly seen as a brand awareness channel, with just under

two thirds of respondents citing this function as its primary or secondary role.

While social activity can play a key role in building brand awareness, it is by no means a one-trick

pony. Social’s role is increasingly being recognized across areas as diverse as customer service and

content marketing.

Figure 1: Top roles for social within the organization (up to two options)

Note: The exact survey question was: “Social can play a part in many different types of business activity.

Please choose up to two top roles for social within your / your clients’ organizations.”

Comparison of the results for smaller and larger companies (on the next page) shows a broadly

similar pattern, apart from a couple of key differences. Larger organizations (those with $150m +

revenues) are more likely to see ‘brand awareness’ as a key role for social.

1 See Appendix (Section 11) for detail about the profile of survey respondents.




By a similar percentage, smaller companies are more likely to regard lead generation as a top role.

For smaller businesses in particular, social offers a more manageable channel for lead generation,

enabling them to reach prospects cheaply and effectively, in a way which is harder to scale within

larger enterprises.

Client-side respondents Figure 2: Top roles for social within the organization (up to two options)

Note: For this and some other charts, we have split out data by size of responding companies.

The exact survey question was: “Social can play a part in many different types of business activity. Please

choose up to two top roles for social within your / your clients’ organizations.”

In a similar vein, Figure 3 below shows how social can contribute across the board, in virtually

every aspect of digital marketing (email, search marketing and display), but also touching on

other parts of the business. Some of social’s greatest potential is in the areas where the fewest

organizations are currently taking advantage, such as product development (24%),

personalization and targeting (29%) and content management (28%).

What is the biggest myth in the marketing industry about social media?

Social is a separate channel

“That you can just ‘do’ social as a separate thing – it must be integrated into the rest of your content strategy.”

“It should be kept separate from your other marketing campaigns.”

“That it’s a ‘separate’ channel. Companies are too quick to dive in to ‘be there’ without having first considered the role of the channel within their broader activities and how it will help them meet their business objectives.”

“That social media should exist as a separate entity and not be integrated into the rest of your marketing strategy.”

“That it can work in splendid isolation from wider marketing and online activities.”

“That it can be handled as a standalone channel. Owner looking for ROI on social only... people selling it as a standalone service... it is all pretty scary to watch really.”

Survey respondents




Figure 3: On which other business areas or functions do your / your clients’ social media activities have an impact?

While the impact of social on a broad range of business functions is clear to see, a significant

proportion of businesses are still resistant to the opportunities afforded by social, or unconvinced

by the business case.

Interestingly, there is still a level of social media inertia among enterprise-level organizations.

Around one in nine (11%) of respondents at companies with annual revenues of more than £100

million disagree that ‘social media is integral to their business strategy’.

While these larger organizations are still very much in the minority, they still represent a number

of companies who, at an organizational and board-room level, are not bought into social media

marketing.

This may be because smaller organizations are more flexible in their approach, and more willing

or able to change the status quo around how business is conducted. Smaller organizations,

without the same issues around scalability of social marketing or customer service activity, may

have more appetite to experiment in an attempt to gain a competitive advantage over large

competitors.

However, it should be stressed that the majority (66%) of larger businesses still see social media

playing a key role within their marketing and business strategies.




Client-side respondents Figure 4: Do you agree or disagree with the following statements?




3. Social KPIs can be business KPIs... and

they should be Before you can measure success, you have to define it. Just over a third of the companies surveyed

report having clear objectives for social media, roughly half the number of those who describe

social media measurement as “very important”. Only 28% of smaller companies and 42% of larger

companies have a plan or procedure to actually measure performance against those objectives.

Given that social is widely seen as integral to marketing and to business more broadly, then it

deserves to be treated like any other channel, with clear-cut objectives and measures of how well

they are being reached.

Many organizations investing in social still expect to see a direct effect on sales and when this is

not evident they conclude that it’s an overhyped channel and social platforms are not delivering

what they are preaching. So it comes as no surprise that around three quarters of client-side

respondents agree that measuring the impact of social is “very difficult”.


The key to measuring social media is to track the ‘hard’ metrics, but also correlate performance

with the over-arching business objectives. If the metrics you are looking at are not relevant to

these objectives, then you are not measuring the impact of social but are rather quantifying

activity. As Figure 6 shows, the majority of companies measure volume of traffic and engagement

with social networks. But they are much less likely to be looking at harder metrics such as the

increase in sales/leads (26%) or reduction in customer service calls (7%).




Figure 6: Does your organization / do your clients use any of the following metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) relating to social media activity?

To truly measure social return on investment (ROI), organizations need to start mapping their

social efforts to their business objectives. However, most of them still perceive social media as an

add-on that the business can plug into instead of allowing all business functions to capitalize on

the possibilities.

The measurement process can be simplified by using a framework that can be applied to social

media and provides a common language that all areas of the business can understand and

communicate in. Social media not only provides opportunities to influence sales drivers, but also

to determine the extent to which they contribute to the increase in revenue. It can be used to look

at how companies can leverage social media to add more value to the bottom line.

The table on the next page [Table 1] describes in more detail the three stages companies typically

go through when measuring social media and how they can map social metrics and key

performance indicators (KPIs) to business objectives. This table has been prepared by

Econsultancy specifically for this report.

If stage one is looking at volume and engagement metrics, stage two is looking for opportunities

such as reduced customer service or brand sentiment tests that help establish social media impact

and any effect on search rankings. Stage three looks at how social has a halo effect on the

performance of other channels and campaigns, quantifying this as part of the process.




Table 1: Mapping business objectives to social media KPIs

Stage Business objective Social media KPIs / metrics

Stage 1: Volume and engagement

Increase website traffic Number of fans / followers / shares

Relevant follower / fan base

Clickthrough rates

Volume of traffic from social media channels

Drop-off rate of social traffic vs other traffic sources

Share of return visitors from social media vs other traffic sources

Page views / unique visitors / time spent on site

Top keywords

Frequency of social media brand mentions

Share of voice (number of conversations about brand vs competitors/market)

Social media buzz volume

Post effectiveness / true reach

Stage 2: Brand health and customer experience

Improve brand sentiment and service levels

Sentiment variation over time – positive, negative or neutral

Sentiment variation by social media channel

Number of positive ratings and reviews

Number of brand advocates

Number of customer issues addressed on social media channels

Number of customer issues resolved / resolution rate

Reduction in customer service calls

Improvement in search engine placement

Stage 3: Impact on the bottom line

Improve lead generation and increase sales

Number of leads

Cost per lead and lead conversion rate (vs other channels)

Support cost (per customer in social channels)

Share of repeat customers (from social media vs other channels)

Sales revenue (directly or ‘assisted’)

Transaction value per customer

Customer lifetime value




4. Social ROI doesn’t end at direct sales ‘How can I monetize social media?’ This is a popular question asked by business owners and

finance directors who may be wondering how exactly they can translate their thousands of

Facebook fans or Twitter followers into dollars, pounds or euros.

As the tag cloud2 below (based on an open-ended survey question) suggests, for many businesses,

the value of social media marketing is not defined purely in revenue terms. Words such as ‘brand’

and ‘engagement’ are more prominent than ‘revenue’ and ‘sales’, which can be viewed either as a

symptom of the failure to attribute sales to social media (either directly or indirectly) or as a

realistic appraisal of where the value of social lies.

Figure 7: How do you define social media ROI?

How do you define social media ROI?

“We define it as the benefits outweighing the investment of time, resources and money. We measure the benefits

as increased employee satisfaction/engagement, increase in qualified inquiries about products/services we have

promoted via social media, and increased awareness of our company and its services.”

“Rather ROE – return on our engagement. Being able to prove that the time spent engaging with stakeholders on

social media channels is beneficial to the organization and reputation within the sector.”

“The ROI of social media is defined differently based on what you are looking to accomplish. Some of our clients

are looking to raise awareness of their brand which would be measured by engagement, shares, and brand

mentions. For some clients, social media is used as a lead generator measured by contact inquiries. In short,

social media ROI is the campaign’s ability to deliver the specific purpose of the campaign itself.”

“It depends based on the business objectives you are working to. I would say the top ones are incremental

revenue (where it can be measured), net sentiment score (What impact is your activity having on the sentiment

towards your brand/product?) and engagement (Are you creating advocates out of customers?).”

Survey respondents

While some may argue that the ‘monetization’ question is missing the point, many businesses are

getting better at measuring the direct value afforded by social media marketing. For a publisher,

part of the value of social activity may be increased traffic which drives value by creating more

page views to sell to advertisers. For those businesses with transactional websites, who wouldn’t

want to measure the impact on revenue?

2 All the tag clouds in this report have been created using Wordle.




The chart below shows the extent to which responding companies track a range of revenue-

related metrics, with just under half of companies claiming (rightly or wrongly) that this question

isn’t relevant. It can be seen that enterprise-level businesses are more likely than smaller

companies to be tracking revenue generated (directly) by social media activity (34% versus 25%),

and also sales where social has assisted (23% vs 17%).

The companies using more granular revenue-related metrics (e.g. the impact of sentiment, social

shares or Facebook likes on sales) are very much in the minority. But this chart shows that this

type of measurement is possible, though many businesses may still be wrestling with a more basic

understanding of sales directly attributable to social media.

Client-side respondents Figure 8: Relating specifically to revenue, does your organization measure any of the following?

What is the biggest myth in the marketing industry about social media?

Social should immediately drive demand and sales

“I get frustrated by the idea that social media can and should have a short term/ effect on sales and for virtually

no investment. Most marketers/directors don’t have a long term view of how social media contributes to the business or in fact a long-term view of marketing planning at all, let alone overall business strategy.”

“That it’s a silver bullet that immediately creates leads and sales opportunities.”

“People still are viewing it as another sales funnel – when they post five updates a week they are surprised that it doesn’t increase sales fivefold. It isn’t, it is a communication tool and should be treated as such.”

Survey respondents




5. Marketing attribution: understanding

the helping role of social There’s too much we don’t know about social marketing and its precise value, but most would

agree that its importance goes far beyond direct sales from socially driven clicks. Unfortunately,

it’s one thing to acknowledge complexity, and another to move forward in a way that reflects it.

The industry has been here before. From the earliest days of email, smart marketers and even a

few analysts accurately pointed out that the total impact of email went far beyond the clicks that

resulted from email links. Similarly, veterans of the display ad world warned against the use of

clicks as a primary metric for success, because it encouraged the industry to ignore larger and

more important branding effects.

In both cases, there’s (still) a gap between what we know and how we behave. Marketers might

know that clicks don’t reflect display success, but they pay attention anyway, because unlike

brand lift, clicks are easy to measure and compare.

The arrival of social networking has been so dramatic that the channel has the opportunity to

avoid the same pitfalls, but that’s not inevitable. This study, among others, suggests that the

challenges to measuring and analyzing social are still formidable, so the clock is ticking.

Organizations that don’t get a grasp on the different ways that social impacts their business will

settle on a narrow view, which will limit the resources they devote to social and over time, its

effectiveness.

Figure 9: What is the deepest level of social media impact that your organization / clients can track?




In Figure 9, we see that the need for a broader view in social is significant. Fewer than one in four

organizations is looking beyond engagement metrics to either social’s influence on other channels

or its direct impact on revenue.

The answer for some organizations is the practice of marketing attribution, the process of

evaluating how different channels impact consumers and each other. It’s an attempt to reflect the

new complexity of product research and purchase, where the customer journey is a tumult of

pushed marketing and pulled research within multiple offline and online experiences.

Marketing attribution is an important step forward for any channel marketer, but especially for

those who work with tactics such as social, which influence behavior and support sales that come

via other channels. Marketing and budgeting processes have historically overlooked the middle of

the customer journey, where influence and research occur instead focusing only on conversions at

the narrowest part of the funnel.

Social is clearly not a channel that is always primed for direct sales , but it is shaping up to be the

ultimate in assistance for channels such as pay-per-click search and display advertising. When

assessing the contribution of social on a first-click attribution basis rather than the more

commonly used last-click attribution model, the value of social can be almost twice as high.3 As of

now, only 11% of responding companies have some capability to examine the impact of social

media on other channels, slightly less than those who measure its direct impact on sales.

Social media spending is still on the rise because marketers know that social plays an important

role in building engagement, reinforcing brand and improving customer service. They suspect

that social does more, by both influencing and enabling sales, but the majority is still flying blind.

This group is in danger of settling for an incomplete and inaccurate view, which can slow or even

stop their marketing evolution.

3 http://success.adobe.com/en/na/programs/digital-index/1205_18011_social_media.html

http://success.adobe.com/en/na/programs/digital-index/1205_18011_social_media.html




6. Failure to use social data within

enterprises to optimize marketing We’ve come far enough to know that social media strategy and overall business strategy are

deeply linked and will only become more so. Yet we don’t have the data to fully understand (or in

many cases even partially understand) how social works as a marketing channel or a conduit for

customer conversation and sentiment.

Social data may well prove to be the most useful dataset many companies have in the areas of

prediction, optimization and knowledge gathering for marketing and other key business areas,

but many organizations have only scratched the surface.

As Figure 10 below shows, around two thirds of companies agree that ‘social media marketing

needs to be more rooted in data’, but far fewer companies agree that they ‘leverage social data to

optimize marketing strategies’. A case for concern with enterprise-level companies is that those

who don’t harness social data for marketing outnumber those who say they do leverage this data.





Where is the data coming from? An on-going problem for businesses is the diversity of social-

related data collected from a range of different tools and platforms, which may sit in different

areas of the organization, or even with agencies.

As shown in Figure 11, the most commonly collected types of social data are web analytics (82%)

and Facebook’s social graph data (72%). But there is also widespread collection of data from other

types of platforms such as social listening (47%), social media management and engagement

(30%), dedicated social analytics tools (25%) and sentiment analysis (19%). It is no wonder that

aggregating and making sense all this data can feel like herding cats.

Figure 11: What are the sources of social data your clients / organization collect(s) or analyze(s)?

What do you think is the biggest myth in the marketing industry about social media?

Social is not measurable

“That it’s still (somehow) not measurable. Work out KPIs, work out what you want to report back on, and do it!”

“That there isn’t any measurable financial impact.”

“It’s not measurable and it should be kept separate from your other marketing campaigns.”

“That it’s somehow a unique, mysterious space that’s hard to measure. It is, of course, just another channel."

“Lack of traceability – and a concomitant failure to see this is an organizational issue, not a fault of social media

(it threatens existing marketing structures).”

Survey respondents




So what are social data being used for? Figure 12 charts the extent to which companies surveyed

are harnessing social data for a range of reasons related to a number of business objectives,

showing a comparison with data from a similar survey in 20114.

Around half of companies are now using social data to enable more ‘targeted and relevant

communication’, ‘to address specific comments or complaints by individuals’ and ‘to gauge

sentiment’.

This chart, probably more than any other, shows the range of business departments with a stake

in social media, including sales and marketing, PR and communications, new product

development and customer service.

Client-side respondents Figure 12: Change since 2011 – Does your organization use social data for any of the following?

Source for 2011 data: http://econsultancy.com/reports/third-quarterly-digital-intelligence-briefing

Note: In 2011, this was a multi-radio question (‘Using now’ / ‘Planning to use’ / ‘No plans to use’)

4 http://econsultancy.com/uk/reports/third-quarterly-digital-intelligence-briefing

http://econsultancy.com/reports/third-quarterly-digital-intelligence-briefing

http://econsultancy.com/uk/reports/third-quarterly-digital-intelligence-briefing




7. Integration needs knowledge...

knowledge needs data... data needs tech Integration of social intelligence into marketing processes and decision-making presents an array

of challenges which are familiar to any marketer seeking to translate seemingly endless waves of

data into something meaningful and consistent.

As established in the previous chapter, social data can be generated by specific social network

activity, social listening technology and social publishing platforms. Today, most organizations

manage social media through a variety of tools from a mix of their agencies, vendors and the

social media properties they work with. Additionally, many organizations operate with web

analytics and business intelligence platforms which themselves do not exist in the same data

universe.

The tag cloud and ‘barriers’ chart below make it clear that the difficulties of unifying different

social data sources are disparate, covering physical separation, a lack of know-how, a paucity of

analysts, deficient systems or technology, and non-conducive, ‘stove-pipe’ organizational

structures. As Figure 13 shows, no one factor is cited by more than 41% of organizations, with

many of them overlapping or inextricably linked.

The key to untangling these knotty problems is a joined-up approach to data, which can only be

kick-started by someone senior within the enterprise who recognizes the need to break down the

silos between different business departments and marketing channels. The larger the enterprise,

the more difficult a unified approach, which explains why smaller companies are sometimes more

nimble in their ability to harness social data.

For the data sources to be unified, they need to be stored in systems which ideally sit within the

same platform or at least reside within point solutions which are connected, even if separate.

Figure 13: What, if anything, is preventing your organization / clients from harnessing social data as effectively as you would like?




Figure 14: Please briefly describe any challenges which restrict your ability to integrate different types of social data.

Please briefly describe any challenges which restrict your ability to integrate different types of social data.

“The various different channels require different effort and give back different results (and sometimes no

results). Trying to ‘group’ this all together for the business to understand is quite the challenge!”

“There’s a long list of data related activities and social is just one of them... I guess we are yet to believe there is a

strong ROI behind social media integration which is keeping this low down the priority list.”

“Too much data is causing problems, and the inability to link that data to other sources (specifically revenue

figures and brand tracking).”

“Platforms’ reluctance to integrate – each social media network is working toward forcing you to log in to the

channel to increase advertising revenue.”

“Perceived scope and scale of change needed, lack of willingness to do it, lack of champion support within the

organization.”

“Lack of expertise and understanding of systems, differences in opinion and lack of clarity of overarching

objectives within international businesses.”

Survey respondents




8. The role of technology… and where it

can fall short The tools of social are a jumble of free and paid technologies mixed with lots of manual labor and

spreadsheets. Across a range of activities, companies are more likely to be using a free tool, or no

tool at all, to manage or leverage social media. This mirrors the development of all new digital

channels, but the problem is especially acute with social, because it’s far more than simply a

channel.

The social internet is a proxy of the internet itself, and for millions of people, the difference is lost

entirely. For marketers, there are social versions of virtually all of the paid channels they deal with

(PPC, email and display for example), the “earned” aspects of social PR and the “owned” media of

Facebook pages, Twitter streams and Pinterest boards.

Client-side respondents Figure 15: Do you use third party technology for any of the following social media-related activities?

Marketers are doing their best to deal with the proliferation of new responsibilities and

opportunities presented by social, but at most organizations, it means cobbling together a mix of

tools and techniques.

For a period, it seemed that the dominance of Facebook might result in a fairly simple set of

technologies related to managing the specific social signals from the networking giant. But it has

become clear that even if Facebook continues to grow, it’s not the end of the social evolution.

The rapidity with which a site like Pinterest can become important to certain sectors proves that

no one experience will be enough for consumers. More on this in Section 9 below. Even if

newcomers are bought up, their unique experiences will continue to require new methods of

evaluation, management and optimization.




To move ahead, many companies will seek to find methods and technologies for unifying social

media management and analytics. Looking at the zeitgeist among marketers of what’s missing in

their tech, the concepts center around the hub of efficient understanding. Marketers need to

understand what’s happening across disparate sites and types of experience (analytics,

measurement and sentiment), but they need to gain that knowledge in an efficient way

(integration, platform and data).

Figure 16: Is there any specific capability you feel is currently missing from social media marketing technology?

Is there any specific capability you feel is currently missing from social media marketing technology?

“A single tool to cover all the bases. Nothing effectively covers social channel management with meaningful monitoring and insight capabilities.”

“You should be able to link all social media more effectively and have a good crossover tool to manage several ventures at once.”

“With diverse sources utilized within the customer research and purchase process, the ability for a social tool to easily and intelligently combine the data with other non-social elements will be a clear winner.”

“Analytics: integration of different platforms and the ability to customize metrics within a measurement system is still somewhat limited.”

“A central tool that pulls all the relevant data together, and combines with other business data.”

“A single platform allowing us to converge on affiliate-style tracking, content management, sentiment

measurement, custom measurement of behavior and engagement.”

“Good sentiment analysis. We still do this manually to get accurate data.”

“Social media tools currently just look at the symptoms not the causes of certain patterns and trends.”

Survey respondents




The industry has a long way to go. Today, point solutions and manual labor are the standard, but

not the state of the art. Only 16% of organizations with revenues over $150 million are connecting

their social activities with a single platform. The key to success for emerging solutions is the same

as it is for social marketing organizations – flexibility. Not only are audiences going to find new

ways to connect online, but marketing is going to find new ways of creating experiences in and

around those connections. Being able to evolve along with the audience is essential.

Client-side respondents Figure 17: ‘We connect all social activities together with a single platform’




9. Your audience is complex, so is your

social landscape No social site is an island, even if it has nearly a billion users. Even if Facebook manages to avoid

the cyclical crush of fashion and the fate of MySpace, marketers know that it’s not enough to focus

on a single social property, because their audience doesn’t. Rather than coalescing around a few

services, it seems more likely that consumers will add to their social repertoire, using niche

networks to fit with specific tasks and aspects of their lives. Marketers are responding by

expanding their brand presence across a number of alternatives. Many of the most important (for

now) are shown in Figure 18.

Client-side respondents Figure 18: On which social web properties do you have a brand presence?

Facebook is under pressure from the financial markets that is inevitably going to drive

marketing innovation5 at the networking giant. If new products follow the pattern of existing

ones, there will be huge variation in success. While some marketers report high ROI from pay

per click ads, for example, others have abandoned the channel entirely. Helping define what

ROI is (beyond direct sales) is also a question Facebook will need to help marketers answer.

Offering the unique ability to focus an otherwise overwhelming stream of information,

Twitter is well positioned for long-term dominance in its category. The ROI of social at most

companies is still being determined, but from anecdotes and case studies6, Twitter gets strong

reviews, and there’s little doubt of its value in building brand equity and as the customer

service channel of choice for the hyper-connected. But Twitter is not mainstream; the

company’s official estimate of 140m active users gives it roughly 17% the reach of Facebook.

5 http://econsultancy.com/blog/10581-facebook-experiments-with-sponsored-search-ads 6 http://econsultancy.com/blog/10248-the-roi-of-facebook-and-twitter-infographic

http://econsultancy.com/blog/10581-facebook-experiments-with-sponsored-search-ads

http://econsultancy.com/blog/10248-the-roi-of-facebook-and-twitter-infographic

http://econsultancy.com/blog/10581-facebook-experiments-with-sponsored-search-ads

http://econsultancy.com/blog/10248-the-roi-of-facebook-and-twitter-infographic




YouTube is synonymous with online video, and some estimates suggest that consumption

has grown by roughly 50% in each of the past several years, even though the overall audience

in the US and UK has barely changed. Our appetite for moving pictures online includes much

more than cats on parade…consumers are watching content of every type and using video

search to organize them. YouTube dominates many measures, but doesn’t make the top 107 in

terms of ads viewed.

The ultimate in “niche” sites, LinkedIn’s has become ubiquitous in the networked life of

business professionals. For years, the site was challenged in translating that popularity into

revenue. But, recent ad innovations are giving business to business marketers viable paid-for

options to add to advances in tailoring organic efforts8.

Both a success story and cautionary tale for marketers, the rise of Pinterest shows the social

media strata isn’t as stable as it might have appeared for the last several years. The site has

rapidly become a source of relevant traffic9, for retailers at least, and has managed to create

and capture the eponymous act of “pinning.”

After several miscues, Google Plus is at least a modest success10, a ghost town with a real

estate boom. It seems designed for the long game, growing slowly and asking little of its users

but offering enough value to marketers as a strong “social signal” to its cousins in the Google

product family.

Instagram is a simple and elegant way to effortlessly spread compelling content, seemingly

the perfect product for the Age of (Over)Sharing. Since its billion-dollar acquisition by

Facebook, the service has grown its user base from 15M to over 80M, and attracted 40 of the

top 100 consumer brands11.

The opportunities and challenges of proliferating channels demand balance - devoting enough

resources across social properties to maintain presence and build expertise while not spreading

those resources too thin where they matter most. For many organizations, that means mapping

usage patterns across multiple subsets of their audience. Unlike some other channels, it’s not as

simple as basic demographics; many variables can impact when, how and why we choose social

alternatives as consumers… and as marketers.

7 http://econsultancy.com/blog/9078-us-web-users-watch-40bn-online-videos-in-january 8 http://econsultancy.com/blog/10149-linkedin-introduces-targeted-status-updates 9 http://econsultancy.com/blog/10481-nine-awesome-pinterest-infographics 10 http://econsultancy.com/blog/9274-sxsw-could-developers-fill-the-ghost-town-of-google-plus 11 http://econsultancy.com/blog/10505-use-of-instagram-growing-among-top-brands-report

http://econsultancy.com/blog/9078-us-web-users-watch-40bn-online-videos-in-january

http://econsultancy.com/blog/10149-linkedin-introduces-targeted-status-updates

http://econsultancy.com/blog/10481-nine-awesome-pinterest-infographics

http://econsultancy.com/blog/9274-sxsw-could-developers-fill-the-ghost-town-of-google-plus

http://econsultancy.com/blog/10505-use-of-instagram-growing-among-top-brands-report


http://econsultancy.com/blog/9078-us-web-users-watch-40bn-online-videos-in-january

http://econsultancy.com/blog/10149-linkedin-introduces-targeted-status-updates

http://econsultancy.com/blog/10481-nine-awesome-pinterest-infographics

http://econsultancy.com/blog/9274-sxsw-could-developers-fill-the-ghost-town-of-google-plus





10. Punching above its weight: social still a

small direct investment Separate Econsultancy research12 shows that corporate budgets for social media are the fastest-

growing in digital marketing. Two-thirds of companies surveyed at the start of this year said they

were increasing their budgets for off-site (69%) and on-site social media (66%) in 2012.

Of course, despite their fastest-growing nature, budgets in the social arena are still typically

modest compared to more established marketing channels such as television advertising or even

paid search marketing.

For the purposes of this report, we asked companies to indicate their level of spending for social

media. The chart below shows how much companies are spending, shown separately for

companies falling either side of the $150m annual revenue threshold.

Client-side respondents Figure 19: How much do you spend annually on social media marketing activity?

While the smaller companies typically spend up to $5,000 on social media annually, there is a

much more mixed spread of social media spending for the larger organizations. Notably, there are

significant numbers of large companies spending next to nothing. For these companies spending

little, more will need to be done by social media platforms to prove ROI and help marketers form

a business case for spending on these channels.

Just because it can punch above its weight and drive great return on investment, social marketing

activity should never be seen as a cheap option compared to channels which suck up more media

12 Econsultancy Marketing Budgets Report 2012, in association with Experian Marketing Services, http://econsultancy.com/reports/marketing-budgets

http://econsultancy.com/reports/marketing-budgets




costs. The internal or agency costs of managing a social media presence on various platforms

around the clock should not be under-estimated.

Figure 20 shows that social media budgets are coming from a combination of newly created

marketing budgets and money taken from other marketing channels. Despite some re-

distribution of budgets, and a well-documented shift of marketing budgets to digital channels,

there is no widespread evidence of a straight swap from above-the-line marketing to social.

The landscape is much more nuanced than that, and it is not always as clear-cut as the case of

Procter & Gamble making public its shift of offline advertising dollars to digital (and laying off

traditional marketers) after its success with media earned from its Old Spice campaign.

More typically, advertisers are striving for the right balance of marketing channels and adjusting

their budgets sensibly to ensure that they have the right balance between paid, owned and earned

media.

Client-side respondents Figure 20: Where is the budget coming from for your social media marketing?




11. Appendix: Respondent profiles This sixth Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing is based on an online survey of more than 650

client-side and agency respondents, carried out in August 2012. Econsultancy and Adobe

promoted the survey to their respective databases of marketers.

Figure 21: Which of the following best describes your company or role?




11.1. Geography Around a third (32%) of respondents are based in North America and 63% in Europe. Other

countries and regions represented include Australia, South America and the Middle East.

Figure 22: In which country / region are you (personally) based?




11.2. Business sector Respondents work across a wide range of different industry sectors. The best represented sectors

are retail and mail order (13%), travel (9%), financial services (9%) and education (9%). Just under a third of respondents (30%) specify ‘other’ as their sector. Other sectors included public

sector/not-for profit and IT.

Figure 23: In which business sector is your organization?




11.3. Business focus The chart below shows to what extent businesses are focused on B2B, B2C, or both. Just under

half of respondents (45%) are exclusively focused on B2C, while around a third (34%) are B2B

focused. Just over a fifth (21%) are focused on both B2B and B2C.

Figure 24: Is your business focused more on B2B or B2C?




11.4. Size of company by revenue The charts below show the annual revenue of responding (client-side) organizations.

At the upper end of the scale, just under a half (47%) of client-side respondents outside the UK expect their companies to earn more than $1bn in 2012.

Client-side respondents Figure 25: Approximately how much is your company expected to generate in revenue in 2012?

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