New Social Media Research Points the Way Toward 2012

What’s New for Social Media in 2012?

It’s reaching the end of the year and people will be looking to new studies that point the way to trends in social and business for 2012. Two recent studies point the way to some of the trends that companies should watch for in the coming year.

The new report from Pivot is called The State of Social Marketing 2011 – 2012 and it has some interesting findings. Along with The Hudson Group, Pivot surveyed 181 brand managers, agency professionals, and experts to find out how they plan to reach their social consumers in 2012. The results can serve as a benchmark for leaders to assemble their business strategies over the next year.

Pivot asked if respondents had a clear picture of who their social consumer is. According to the report, “an astounding 77% said yes.”

This is interesting because it is all perception on the part of the companies. This means that the majority of these professionals have some sort of web and/or social media monitoring tool and have set up a listening program to figure out what their customers are saying online. That step is absolutely essential. I’d also like to stress how your listening program should cover a wider perspective than simply what is being said on Facebook and Twitter. Organic searches and links from other websites are still driving more traffic to blogs than anything else.

Another one of the best ways to figure out who your social consumers are is simple: Ask them. When the Pivot team explored specifically if respondent organizations asked social consumers what they expect from engagement,  53% said they haven’t really asked. Almost 35% said they had asked, which is a lot different from the 77% who said they had a clear picture of their social consumers. Does that mean 42% of them are involved in web and social media monitoring?

100% of respondents say increased sales is a primary goal for 2012, but there are many other practical applications for social media that also ranked highly.

As business leaders plan next year’s social marketing programs, 100%, agree on the need to increase sales, but social media programs and campaigns can affect so much more than that. As we have found here at Spiral16, there are all kinds of ways that businesses get value out of social media. Not surprisingly, consumer engagement, lead generation and brand lift are also towards the top of the list. According to Pivot:

Influencing consumer behavior is at just over 60 percent, establishing points of influence at just under 60 percent, and discovering points of relevance shown at 40 percent spotlight how new touchpoints will play a role in driving desirable outcomes and experiences. The overall sense of the responses is a tilt away from “soft” benefits toward harder edged benefits that drive the bottom line. Surprisingly, improving customer service and support was toward the bottom of the list, but it is promising to see that the research does show that businesses are placing it in the upper half of 2012 planning.

My feeling is that one reason customer service ranked so low here is that many of the respondents feel like they are already addressing that concern sufficiently. Customer service is one of the first social marketing applications that active brands can do, especially if they have an active consumer base on Twitter.

Meanwhile, the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs published a popular study on B2B content marketing put out their B2B Content Marketing: 2012 Budgets, Benchmarks and Trends report, which looks at the specific kinds of content that B2B businesses are creating to attract customers.

Just as they found in last year’s study, “article posting and social media (excluding blogs) are the most popular tactics and are currently used by 79% and 74% of B2B marketers, respectively.” The tactics that are seeing an increased adoption rate this year are:

• Blogs (27% increase)
• White papers (19% increase)
• Videos (27% increase)

It’s no surprise, all signs point upward for social marketing again this year and the studies show that more and more marketers and agencies are figuring out how to find value online. How far are you in your organization?

The social consumers are out there. Have you been able to make gains using social media? The first step in any program should be listening on the web – have you started?

 http://www.spiral16.com/blog/2011/12/new-social-media-research-points-the-way-toward-2012/