REPORT: Social Media and Online Brand Monitoring Trends Briefing

The digital publishing and training group Econsultancy has released a June 2010 report on Social Media and Online Brand Monitoring Trends. The free briefing (membership required) contains an overview of market trends, tips for best practice, new statistics and useful resources. The information was collated from sources including: Econsultancy conferences, supplier showcases and roundtables; Third party events; Research carried out by Econsultancy and other organizations.

Findings in the report include the following:

• The geo-location app/service FourSquare has shown impressive growth in the first half of 2010. As of April 2010, the site had approximately 725,000 users, and more than 22 million “check-ins‟.
• 59% of companies do not have any social media policies in place.
• Who “owns” a company’s social media presence is an important issue and must be addressed to avoid problems when employees leave and to ensure proper branding and messaging.
• Social media is a great tool for listening to customers and improving products and service based on feedback.
• Reaching a small number of highly influential individuals (who are likely to purchase your product) is often more effective than a high volume, low influence approach, where the end audience is less likely to make a purchase.
• Increased brand awareness was seen as major benefit of social media by 73% of companies, according to Econsultancy’s Social Media and Online PR Report in association with bigmouthmedia.
• The most important benefits of social media for companies are: increased customer engagement (71%), better brand reputation (66%) and increased communication with key influencers (62%).
• Nearly two-thirds of companies (61%) say that social media provides tremendous opportunities for their business.
• The most successful companies immerse themselves in the social media channel and take a strategic approach, as only 1% of companies who are heavily involved in social media say that they have gained no real value from the channel.
• A third of companies (35%) manage their social activity through their digital marketing team, compared to a just over a fifth (21%) whose social media activity is managed by their PR or communications team.
• The biggest barrier to better social media engagement for companies is lack of resources (54%).
• Two-thirds of marketers are planning to increase investment in social media even though less than one-fifth can effectively measure ROI.
• Some 70% of companies are planning to increase their marketing budgets for off-site social media (e.g. networking sites, Facebook and Twitter).
• More than half of companies surveyed (55%) use Facebook to improve brand awareness and reputation. Just under half are using Facebook as a marketing channel (47%) or for publicizing new content (46%).
• The most common uses of Twitter are for improving brand awareness and reputation (50%), publicizing new content (49%) and as a marketing channel (47%).
• 34% of companies have increased their social media budget in the last 12 months.

Tags: best practices, Corrie Davidson, e-Commerce, Marketing, pr, research, Social Media, statistics, study

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