2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report

While the speculation, pontification and monetization of social media is reaching momentum of tsunami proportions, many businesses looking for practical advice are asking, “Exactly how are marketers using social media to grow their businesses?”


Michael Stelzner from Social Media Examiner has posed that same question and others like it to a sample of marketers on the front lines of the social web to help bring some clarity to what works, what doesn’t and where to focus.


When asked about the bearing of the report on the intersection of search and social, Mike said, “With Google integrating results from its Google+ network into search, we’ll begin to see an Amazon type social proofing of search results based on the activity of friends.  This will make search even more important.” We agree!


The 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report is out today and offers 42 pages of insights, tables, graphs and examples of tactics. Over 3,800 respondents provided their advice on the who, what, when, and where of social media marketing. They also shared where they plan on investing in the future.


Key subject matter covered in the report includes:


The top 10 social media questions marketers want answered:
The time commitment
The benefits of social media marketing
Commonly used social media services:
Social media sites people want to learn more about
Social media outsourcing
B2B vs B2C
Changes since the 2011 report




How much time should you spend on social media marketing tasks each week? It’s a reasonable question and the responses broke down as:


59% – 6 hours / week or more
33% – 11 hours / week or more
15%  - 20+ hours / week
Other key findings from the 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report include:


83% of marketers indicate that social media is important for their business.
Top benefits of social media marketing:
85% Generating more business exposure
69% increasing traffic
65% providing marketplace insight
76% of marketers plan on increasing their use of YouTube and video marketing
While only 40% of marketers are using Google+, 70% of marketers want to learn more about it and 67% plan on increasing Google+ activities
This report is a perfect compliment to the upcoming Social Media Success Summit online conference coming up on May 1st. You can get your basic questions answered and some alignment with what others are doing from the report and then get practical advice, tips and training from consultants and practitioners from the online conference.  It’s a great example of content marketing to promote an event actually.