Marketers want more social media guidance
Social shortfall. Many UK agencies and consultants are not providing enough guidance to their clients on social media, according to the 2010 McCann Erickson Social Media Index.
Almost half of marketing and comms professionals surveyed said they still don’t feel they have adequate knowledge on how best to use social media channels effectively for marketing purposes, a figure McCann Erickson Bristol calls ‘surprisingly high’.
Close to a quarter of respondents admitted that advances in social media are difficult to keep up with, and almost the same proportion said they would like to understand social media more but that it is not easy to find genuine experts in the field.
“Interestingly, in just 12 months since the last survey, there has been a marked increase in general social media usage for communications activities,” says McCann Erickson. “On average, usage for each of the main social networks – Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – is up by around 22% from last year. Twitter has shown the most increased usage (+28.2% since 2009) with 61% of those surveyed now saying that Twitter is regularly used as a way of distributing news stories.”
Social media monitoring for brands is now a key area for marketers who need to demonstrate effectiveness of activity, ROI and target audience usage of social networks. Forty five percent use free Google Alerts, with Radian 6 emerging as the most widely used paid-for tool, followed by PR Newswire’s Social Media Metrics.
Eleven percent of those surveyed said they relied on their retained PR agency to monitor social media brand activity. and 37% said they conducted ad hoc monitoring in house.
