| ||||||||||||
PRINT
COMMENT
SUBSCRIBE
RSS| Marketer's Use of Social Media Tools | |
| Social Media | % Respondents Using |
| | 86% |
| Blogs | 79 |
| | 78 |
| | 77 |
| YouTube or other video | 41 |
| Social bookmark sites | 38 |
| Forums | 38 |
| StumbleUpon | 28 |
| Digg, Reddit or similar | 26 |
| FriendFeed | 18 |
| Source: Social Media Marketing Industry Report, March 2009 | |
Key survey findings about specific application show that:
- Small-business owners are more likely to use LinkedIn than employees working for a corporation
- Men are significantly more likely to use YouTube or other video marketing than women (52.4% of all men compared with 31.7% of women)
- For those just getting under way with social media marketing, LinkedIn is ranked as their number-two choice, pushing blogging down one notch
- Among those who have been using social media for a few months, Facebook is in second place. This group also has more Twitter use
- Twitter is used by 94% of marketers who have been using social media for years, followed closely by blogs. This group also endorses online video significantly more than the other groups
72% of marketers say they have either just started or have been using social media for only a few months.
| Duration of Social Media Use by Marketers (% of Respondents) | |
| Duration | % of Respondents |
| Just getting started | 28% |
| A few months | 44 |
| A few years | 23 |
| No experience, plan to use | 4 |
| No experience, don't plan to use | 1 |
| Source: Social Media Marketing Industry Report, March 2009 | |
The largest group just getting under way with social media marketing is sole proprietors, with 30.2% reporting just getting started, the survey found. Owners of businesses with 2-100 employees were the most experienced, with 29.3% reporting doing social media marketing for years.
64% of marketers are using social media for five hours or more each week, with 39% using it 10 or more hours weekly and 9.6% spending more than 20 hours each week with social media.
- Those working for a company are twice as likely as business owners to be committing 20+ hours a week to social media
- 44.8% of those ages 30-39 old spendi 10+ hours weekly using social media marketing
- 40.3% of 20-to-29 year-olds spend 10+ hours weekly
- 38.7% of 50-to-59 year-olds spend 10+ hours weekly
According to the survey, 81% of all marketers indicate that their social media efforts have generated exposure for their businesses. At least two in three participants found that increased traffic occurred with as little as 6 hours a week invested in social media marketing. Owners of small businesses with 2 - 100 employees are more likely than others to report benefits.
Half of participants reported that a major benefit of social media marketing is the resultant rise in search engine rankings that often comes with increased efforts. Improved search engine rankings were most prevalent among those who've been using social media for years, with nearly 80% reporting a rise.
| Benefits of Social Media Marketing (% of Respondents, multiple response OK) | |
| Benefit | % Responding |
| Generated exposure | 81% |
| Increased traffic, subscribers, list | 61 |
| New business partners | 56 |
| Increased position in search rankings | 52 |
| Generated qualified leads | 48 |
| Reduced overall marketing expenses | 45 |
| Helped close sales | 35 |
| Source: Social Media Marketing Industry Report, March 2009 | |
When marketers were asked which social media tools they most want to learn more about, social bookmarking sites slightly edged out Twitter as the number one response, with a four-way tie for third place between LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Facebook and Digg/Reddit/Mixx.
Please visit this site for the complete Whitepaper of the study, "How Marketers are Using Social Media to Grow their Businesses,"
10 people recommend this article.
RSS FEEDS
Although “Generated qualified leads” and “Helped me close business” were listed as benefits seen by the users of social media in this report, they were near the bottom of the list of eight choices, and no information was given about actual numbers of leads, sales or ROI.
I think it is interesting to note that most of those who said social media helped them generate leads and close business have been active in social networking for years and/or are investing more than 16 hours a week in it.
By the way, some of the results in Stelzner’s report may be biased, considering that only social media was used to promote survey participation, starting with a tweet on Twitter that got retweeted by others and was seen by Twitterers’ networks on other social media including Facebook and LinkedIn.
Mac McIntosh www.sales-lead-experts.com
in response to Lynda Partner, i think her observations may be a result of the sourcing of the survey participants. if i had participated, my responses would have been very much in line with these results, except the companies i have been working with by their social media nature would make me more of an early adopter at first, and a power user down the line. i definitely noticed that in many traditional industries the adoption of social media happen more bottom-up than top down.
interesting whitepaper. will twitter now. :) @britta_sf
This gave me a sample of at least 181 twitter accounts set up by marketers. I then went through and viewed each and every twitter page to determine if they were actually actively in use. My definition of active was more than 10 updates, with at least one of those updates submitted in the last 21 days.
I learned that only 55% of those twitter accounts were by my definition, active, or in other words, about half of the marketers who “used Twitter” to set up an account, had either never posted to it or had not posted anything for the past 3 weeks.
If the list of twitter accounts in the directory accurately reflects the total twitter accounts held by the group’s membership, then active twitter usage among this group of marketing executives is closer to 5%.