Most U.S. marketers spend less than 20 per cent of budget on social

Publish Date

20 Jul

Category

Online Advertising

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The survey found that half of them (49.5 per cent) said their company spent between 1 and 10 per cent of their marketing budget on social media, while 19 per cent spent between 11 and 20 per cent and nearly one-tenth (9.7 per cent) spent nothing on social media.
However, marketers reported that budgets were increasing and 72.9 per cent of respondents said they expected their overall social media budget to increase over the next year. This was further broken down into 56.6 per cent saying they thought their Facebook advertising budget would increase and nearly 40 per cent believing it would stay the same.
This is broadly in line with data from Useful Social Media, which found that in April 2012 54 per cent of US companies planned to increase their social media budgets in 2012.
How marketers best measure the success and ROI of social media like Facebook varies from company to company, with 27.2 per cent of respondents placing the most importance on clickthroughs, 15.8 per cent on assigning a value to Facebook ‘likes’ and 10.7 per cent on using a GRP-like metric. Some 12.9 per cent said they were not really sure how to measure the effectiveness of Facebook ads at all.
While 71 per cent of marketers said they were somewhat satisfied or very satisfied with the measurement metrics available from Facebook, a significant 29 per cent said they were somewhat dissatisfied or very dissatisfied.
In the wake of a less than glorious IPO, this leaves plenty of room for Facebook to improve its insights and metric offerings. This will encourage marketers to participate more on social media and increase advertising budgets down the road.