Digital marketers, what are you using social media for?

We want­ed to know – what are you using social media for in your dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing? So, we asked:

#twit­poll What are you using twit­ter for as a dig­i­tal mar­keter: A) Brand aware­nessB) Lead gen­er­a­tionC) Cus­tomer ser­viceD) Dri­ving sales

— Mar­ket­ing Cloud (@AdobeMktgCloud) May 14, 2013

The results were mixed, but seem to point to the same end result – more cus­tomers! The votes across Twit­ter and Face­book were almost even­ly split between brand aware­ness and lead gen, with a lit­tle bit of cus­tomer ser­vice thrown in for good measure.

Like twit­ter user Cognyt­ics Ana­lyt­ics said:

@adobe­mk­t­g­cloud Aware­ness pri­mar­i­ly. Leads is the end result.

— Cognyt­ics Ana­lyt­ics (@Cognytics) May 14, 2013

Whether your aim is brand aware­ness, lead gen­er­a­tion, cus­tomer ser­vice or sales, social media needs to be man­aged and mea­sured. Social has become an ever impor­tant part of almost any busi­ness and dig­i­tal mar­keters need to make sure social is mea­sur­able and man­age­able with­in their wider mar­ket­ing and busi­ness plans.

We recent­ly pub­lished a report, in asso­ci­a­tion with Econ­sul­tan­cy, where we asked more than 650 mar­ket­ing agen­cies about this very top­ic. Near­ly 70% of respon­dents believed social media needs to be more root­ed in data, but less than 25% said they are lever­ag­ing social data to opti­mise their mar­ket­ing strate­gies. Strange – we know how impor­tant the data is, but we aren’t using it?

Maybe the term “big data” is scar­ing us away? You can see the impact of your social media efforts, and it’s eas­i­ly done with­in some con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems. The trick is inte­grat­ing your social data into the wider busi­ness; you need to map your social media activ­i­ties to busi­ness goals. If you want to increase sales as a busi­ness, then show how your social media cam­paigns drove users to the sales portals.

Know­ing what data you need, and why, will make align­ing busi­ness and social KPIs that much easier.

We also found that few­er than 1 in 5 com­pa­nies have a cen­tral plat­form for social media man­age­ment and analy­sis – yikes!

There’s no blan­ket solu­tion for every busi­ness, so if you need some fur­ther read­ing to fig­ure out yours, take a look at this Quar­ter­ly Dig­i­tal Intel­li­gence Brief­ing: Man­ag­ing and Mea­sur­ing Social.