YouTube: The Next Social Media Marketing Frontier

According to a recent study sponsored by KingFishMedia, HubSpot and Junta42, most companies have a social media strategy, and the vast majority of them handle them internally. Also, while most companies are already leveraging LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, many are eying YouTube as the next stage of their social media plans.

Seventy-two percent of respondents said they currently have a social media marketing strategy, while 27 percent said they do not and 1 percent say they are undecided.

Of those that do not have a social media strategy, 80 percent say they plan on having one within the next 12 months, while 11 percent said they don’t have such plans and 9 percent are undecided.

The study, titled “Social Media Usage, Attitudes and Measurability: What do Marketers Think?” also found that 75 percent of responding companies said they will be increasing their investment in social media during the next year, while 12 percent said they wouldn’t and 13 percent said they don’t know.

Of the group that said they will be boosting their spending, 35 percent said it would be tied to a specific project/custom media program, while 33 percent said it would be an incremental increase to the marketing budget.

Seventy percent said that social media marketing is the marketing department’s responsibility, while 23 percent said it was management’s burden. Meanwhile, 90 percent of respondents said that managing a social media campaign is part of someone’s overall responsibilities, and 9 percent said it’s a dedicated full-time job.

Social media is handled by internal resources at 85 percent of responding companies, while 13 percent outsource it. Of the latter group, 41 percent outsource these responsibilities to freelancers, while 26 percent outsource to ad/marketing agencies and 26 percent outsource to social media agencies.

Two-thirds of respondents said they use social media to promote the company as a whole, while 41 percent said they use it to promote an individual who works there, and 24 percent said they use it to promote a specific brand.

Meanwhile, 70 percent said the scope of their social media campaigns is to acquire new customers and retain customers. Another 23 percent said they use them solely to acquire new customers, and 4 percent said they use it to retain them.

LinkedIn is being used by 87 percent of responding companies, followed by Twitter with 84 percent, Facebook with 78 percent, corporate blogs with 65 percent, YouTube with 47 percent, news aggregator sites with 36 percent, bookmarking sites with 34 percent and MySpace with 9 percent.

Of these sites, YouTube is the one that companies most plan on adding in the next 12 months (53 percent), followed by news aggregator sites (43 percent), bookmarking sites (43 percent) and corporate blogs (37 percent).

Regarding specific tactics, 44 percent of respondents said they plan on utilizing a YouTube channel in the next year. Sadly, 41 percent said they planned on using the now-defunct Google Wave.

The study also found that 70 percent of respondents have not done any advertising on a social media site. For the 30 percent that have, 47 percent said the outcome was as expected, while 18 percent said it was worse than expected, 17 percent said they didn’t measure the outcome, 9 percent said it was far below expectations and 9 percent said it exceeded expectations.

Forty-three percent of respondents said they haven’t measured the ROI of their existing social media campaigns.

Half of all respondents were B2B companies, 33 percent were both B2B and B2C, 10 percent were B2C companies and 4 percent were nonprofits.

Source:

http://www.kingfishmedia.com/marketing-resources/research/social-media-usage-2010