We would define ourselves as casual social media users. We have a blog, use twitter moderately and only when we have something of commercial interest to share, and we maintain a profile and network on Linkedin. Today, we made another contact from our twitter account and have scheduled a webinar. If there was ever any doubt that these social media work as cross media marketing tools, their shouldn’t be.
I found this summary from the Social Media Marketing Industry Report by Michael A. Stelzner to be illuminating. Here's the cheat sheet:
Top three questions marketers want answered:
(1) What are the best tactics to use
(2) how to do I measure the effectiveness of social media and,
(3) where do I start?
Marketers are mostly new to social media:
A significant 88% of marketers surveyed are using social media to market their businesses, BUT 72% have only been doing so for a few months or less.
How much time does this take?
A significant 64% of marketers are using social media for 5 hours or more each week and 39% for 10 or more hours weekly.
The top benefit of social media marketing:
The number-one advantage is generating exposure for the business, indicated 81% of all marketers, followed by increasing traffic and building new business partnerships.
The top social media tools:
Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook were the top four social media tools used by marketers, in that order. Social media tools marketers most want to learn about: Social bookmarking sites were ranked of highest interest, followed closely by Twitter.
For the complete report, click here.
