A recent survey by Awareness provides insights into the challenges and opportunities for social media marketing in businesses.

The survey asked CMOs, marketing managers, and social media managers from corporations about their plans for social media marketing in 2012 and social media marketing challenges they face.

Challenge 1 – Not Enough Resources
Money and people reflect major challenges to social media marketing success to the corporations.  Most firms dedicated between 1 and 3 people to their social media marketing efforts.  A bigger problem is a lack of money dedicated to social media marketing.

Nearly 60% of firm don’t spend ANYTHING on social media !
And, only 14% spend more than $30,000 on their social media marketing efforts. And this reflects spending on firms from less than $1 million in revenue to over $100 million. This, despite the fact even the smallest firms in the survey likely spend $50,000+ on traditional advertising and the largest firm probably send $1 million+, according to Entrepreneur.

Of course, I’m not sure I believe this — it may be an artifact of who they got to respond.  My mid-sized corporate clients are spending between $30,000-$45,000 for social media.

Challenge 2 – Assessing ROI Of course, part of the problem getting enough resources to effectively run your social media marketing campaign is firms don’t feel they can adequately assess the return they get from their investment in social media.

This creates a CHICKEN AND EGG ARGUMENT.  Firms won’t invest in social media until they see results, but they won’t get good results until they increase their investment in social media.< A bigger social media marketing challenge is firms do social media marketing wrong because they’ve not invested in using agencies or consultants who KNOW how to do social media marketing RIGHT.  Firms afraid to spend the money it takes to do social media marketing right, use their failure to achieve desired results as proof that social media marketing expenditures are not valid.

Firms try to assess ROI, but they’re really not sure how to do it.  Sometimes, they borrow tools from traditional advertising, like reach.  Hence, they measure increases in fans, followers, etc.
Others assess ROI with measures of engagement, such as mentions.

The social media marketing challenge is that it takes a certain amount of effort (and money) to rise about the increasing level of noise in social platforms.  Few firms surveyed spent enough to reach this minimum level.

Challenge 3 – Increasing Social Media Marketing
Most firms surveyed agreed their not dedicating enough resources to their social media marketing efforts.  And most hope to fix that in 2012.  Here’s what they said:




Challenge 4 – Concentrating on Only the Top 3
Firms concentrate their limited resources primarily on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  Certainly, the user numbers make this attractive and spending a small budget across lots of social sites makes little sense.  But, firms are missing the most impactful marketing platforms — blogs, YouTube, and mobile.

While respondents aren’t doing much to increase their mobile efforts (which I think is a huge mistake), their number 1 priority in 2012 is blogging.  And YouTube will make a bigger splash in 2012, too.

That’s because firms recognize the impact of fresh content on their websites both from an SEO perspective and in terms of creating engagement.

Your Turn

• What are your plans for 2012?
• How many people and how much money will you spend on social media marketing in 2012?
• How much do you think your competitors are spending? 
• Can you afford to ignore social media marketing as a cornerstone of your marketing efforts in 2012.