Last month Ad Age and RBC Capital Markets jointly performed a major survey on marketers’ attitudes toward social media. The survey polled 1,682 executives at marketing, agency, and media companies to get their opinions on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Here are two key findings:

Most social media budgets are spent on managing accounts, not ads

84% of respondents use Facebook, 74% use Twitter, and 56% use YouTube for marketing purposes. While many marketers use social channels to market their brands, 45% of them spend only 1-10% of their overall marketing budgets on social media. This 1-10% is mostly spent on managing accounts, not on ads.

Mobile ads will drive investment in social media marketing

However, this is expected to change. 63% of respondents said they will increase their Twitter spending and 59% said they expect to invest more on Facebook over the next year. Marketers plans to spend more on social platforms mostly because they want to leverage the channels for mobile advertising.

36% of respondents said the return on investment (ROI) of Facebook's mobile advertising was much greater or somewhat greater than its desktop offering. 44% stated Twitter had better ROI on mobile than on desktop. (Ad Age didn’t specify what was considered as a ‘return’ – it could be a new fan, ‘like,’ or web visit.)



What this means for your social media marketing budget

With more brands planning to increase social media marketing budgets, it raises the bar overall. This overall increase in brands’ social media budgets means that your competitors are getting more aggressive in capturing consumers’ attention, strengthening thought leadership, and entering shoppers’ evoke sets through social media.

If you don’t rise to the challenge and fail to compete for consumers’ attention, your brand risks losing visibility whenever your target audience uses social networks to learn about products and services.

To capture consumers’ attention effectively and develop interest in your brand, create useful textual or visual content for social media. Interact with followers consistently. This engagement will help you bond with prospects more closely by encouraging more emotional attachment to your brand, and increase your chance of converting sales.

If you want some basic tips to get started on social media marketing, read To Marketers Who Want to Improve their Social Media Marketing – But Can’t Get Started, How We Improved Our Social Media Performance with These 3 Tools, and 3 Instagram Tools Every Digital Marketer Can’t Live Without. If you want 1-on-1 consultation for your specific needs, please contact us directly.