• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, June 9, 2016

Twitter, of course, still serves a purpose -- but more and more agencies are shifting marketing spend away from Twitter to Instagram and other social platforms. A recent survey by STRATA found Instagram is now being used more than Twitter in social media advertising campaigns.

While Facebook and YouTube are still tops at 96% and 67%, respectively, 63% plan to use Instagram, while 56% are planning to use Twitter, placing the network in fourth place.  

This marks the first time the photo-sharing program has gained more agency attention than Twitter in the survey. Instagram's rise in the STRATA Survey has historically been strong, jumping 86% from last year while Twitter fell 4% in the same time period. 

Overall, social spend is on the rise with 17% of agencies stating they will allocate up to a quarter of their budgets to social, a 76% increase from last quarter. Social media also moved into the top spot for digital spend at 77% of agencies, a 28% increase over last quarter to overtake display (73%). 

In addition, the first-quarter survey also found that digital spend is increasingly being executed through programmatic exchanges. Thirty-seven percent trust programmatic to execute digital orders, a 22% increase from last quarter. Overall, more dollars are flowing to programmatic buying as agency trust in programmatic improves for digital and non-digital buying. Twenty-one percent of agencies plan to conduct 20-40% of ad spend programmatically -- a 50% increase from last quarter -- while another 41% plan to execute between 10% and 20% of ad buys programmatically. Thirty percent of agencies say they are not planning on making buys programmatically, the lowest percentage of agencies seen in the history of the STRATA Agency Survey. 

Advertisers are also more confident in the ROI of online video ad purchases, as almost half (49%) are fairly confident in its value, while another 10% are "very" confident. Just over a third of agencies are still unsure if they are getting a good ROI on online video ads. Targeting has also improved as more than half (56%) of agencies say their online video ads reach their intended targets most of the time. 

Streaming video and audio both continue to garner more agency interest. Video sites like Hulu and YouTube are also seeing major demand, as 71% of agencies are more interested in advertising on those platforms than they were a year ago, while only 3% say they are not as interested as they were last year, the lowest amount ever in the STRATA Survey. On the audio side, over half (53%) of agencies are more interested in streaming radio like Pandora and iHeartRadio than they were last year, a 15% increase over the first quarter of 2015. 

But digital -- in relation to more traditional media -- still has a long way to go.

Comparing all advertising media, TV is the top choice for agencies, as 48% say they are more focused on spot TV/cable than any other medium, a 16% increase from a year ago. Spot TV saw a 19% increase in agency focus from a year ago, while cable TV saw a 24% increase.