Social media marketing spend still low, finds survey
Social media sites such as Twitter, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook have attained a high profile, but advertisers are still generally spending little on marketing them to potential customers.??
That is one of the findings in a new report by Forrester Research, which found that 75% of marketers have budgeted less than US$100,000 for social media efforts over the next year.
Forrester said that social media has not yet entered the marketing mainstream, but is largely relegated to experimental budgets – despite the fact that social media marketing typically costs less than traditional advertising programmes.
The report said that social media had yet to prove its impact, using accepted measurement standards, in moving customers through the marketing funnel.
That lack of proven impact has relegated efforts to the sidelines: 45% of respondents said their social media budgets are determined on an ’as-needed’ basis. A further 23% scrape together funds from wherever possible to pay for their various social media efforts. Yet despite the unconventional methods which are used to fund many companies’ social media investments, 53% of marketers believe they will increase their spending on these initiatives over the next six months. Another 42% expect their investments to remain the same. Most of the marketers that Forrester surveyed were already using some form of social media, such as blogs, social networking sites, or user-generated content.