How Are Marketers Using Social Media For Business?

Social Media Examiner, one of the biggest social media news and articles platform, has recently published the results of a survey on how marketers use social media to grow their business.

They collected data from a survey, with 2887 participants, mostly their twitter followers and newsletter subscribers. Most participants are from US, UK, Canada and Australia. The aim of the study was to understand how Social Media marketers work, their main concerns, how teams are organized, favorite tools and the most used social networks and strategies among b2b and b2c marketers.

We wanted to write a post comparing other studies in the same line, but, besides the other year’s surveys taken by Social Media examiner, we couldn’t find anything resemble. Anyway, we could find some interesting data to compare and complement the information that Social Media Examiner brought.

This is our selection of key takeaways:

More time spent in Social Media, more and better Benefits for Business

According to this study, the Social Media Marketing role is integrated into the marketing tasks of a professional. A significant 64% of marketers are using social media for 6 hours or more and 37% for 11 or more hours weekly. But this percentage is increasing. Nearly 19% of marketers spend more than 20 hours each week on social media.

The more time these marketers spend in Social Media, more (and better) benefits they can perceive from their actions. Besides the obvious increasing traffic and exposure of the company, partnerships growth and improved search rankings, and sales increasing, are other benefits that Social Media Marketing is bringing to business. 74% of those who spend 40+ hours in this tasks, earn new business through their social media efforts.

Another interesting trend is that, the more experience the marketer has on Marketing in social networks, more time s/he spends working on it. These trends show that Social Media is paying off the efforts for business that decide to embrace these practices.

Content Creation x Content Curation, the highlights

One of the major findings of the Social Media Examiner’s survey is that original written content is most important for social media marketing: A significant 58% of marketers stated that original written content is the single most important form of content, followed by original visual assets (19%).

81% of the marketers said they want to increase their original written content. B2B marketers said that one of their main objectives was to increase their usage of blogging.

Curated Content also plays a big role on the companies’ mix: 73% of the respondents report the use of content from third parties into their social media marketing strategy, and 46% of the interviewed plan on increasing their use of curated content this year, and 40% is keeping their usage the same. B2B marketers were more likely to use curated content (78% B2B vs. 69% B2C).

The Social Networks that Matter

In this study, Facebook is the absolute king, followed by Twitter and Linkedin. “More than half of marketers (54%) chose Facebook as their most important platform, followed by LinkedIn (17%), Twitter (12%) and then blogging (8%).

B2B marketers have a slight preference for Linkedin (33%) over Facebook (31%) . Twitter and Blogging are also more important for the business marketers (16% and 11%, respectively) than for the ones that talks directly to the final consumer.

Google plus is the big challenge. 65% of the marketers want to learn more about it and 61% plan on increasing Google+ activities in 2014.

Social Media Management and Analytic Tools

The social media management and analytic tool panorama seems to not be very defined so far. In this survey, the number 4th main concerns or questions that marketers want answered was on social media tools.

85% feel like they don’t know what tools are best for their needs. Another study, from Social Bakers, made this January, points out that only 31% of the companies their interview make any investment in an analytics tool, and over 41% doesn’t use a tool to publish their updates.

In summary,

Social Media marketing is taking its roots, with more and more hours been dedicated to do it properly.

If you are a social media marketer, we strongly recommend you to read the report, for benchmarking your own productivity and getting trends directly from the field. It’s 50-pages long, but most of them are graphics. And the insights made by Michael A. Stelzner, Social Media Examiner’s founder, are really helpful.

How Are Marketers Using Social Media For Business?