The world of social media spins at a rapid rate – evolving daily, with new tools, techniques, and approaches that seemingly must be adapted to on the turn of a dime. As the complexity of this landscape increases, so too does its importance – presenting a conundrum for businesses that must funnel more resources in order to simply keep up to date. Budgets are rising, whilst impact is falling – and as competition gets fiercer, struggles are being felt as to how to harness this vital medium. Lying central to this issue, is the lack of social media tool buy-in – whilst 92% of marketing departments and sales execs clearly see the value in such tools, the CEOs they must convince are often reticent to take the plunge – a notion backed up by the staggering fact that 68% of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies have no social presence whatsoever.
Bigger budgets, bigger campaigns, but where are the tools?
Marketers now spend 12% of their budget on social media, and as more and more financial commitment is being made to the social arm of a company’s marketing, frustration is being felt – the task of analysing campaign statistics and crunching the numbers of KPIs are all too often impossible, without the right tools. A catch 22 situation has arisen – with budgets rendered ineffective as marketers attempt to grapple and grasp with a vast wealth of data.
What lies behind this isn’t a flat out refusal of CEOs to embrace social, but rather a misunderstanding as to what this medium can deliver; the C-Suite are concerned – worried about reputation and ROI, and lacking in first-hand experience as to how this world really works. And the result? Almost 50% of all boardrooms undervalue the importance of social media.
Employees – A rich social resource that remain (mostly) untapped
In an ever tougher social landscape, the concern about ROI may be a worthy one to address – at which point, it’s worth looking back to 2013, when 37% of employees believed they could do their job better, if their organisation’s management was more supportive of the use of social tools. Some four years on, and few businesses are yet to empower their employees in this way. Our research has put this under the spotlight – and the stats that emerged were even more compelling than we’d predicted…
- 76% of employees would happily share marketing information as content on social media if the company would make it easier
- More than 60% of employees said they would create or share company content if employers made it easier
- Only 31% of employees consider their company “very effective” at sharing internal information quickly