White Paper

The State of Social Media Marketing Report: 7 Major Findings & In-Depth Analysis is a report published by Awareness Social Media Software.

In the report, one key point was that organizations' social marketing goals are mainly just to engage with customers and not to focus on increasing revenue.  This means that organizations are using social media only by means of communicating with their customers instead of driving revenue.

Another interesting point in this report was that the top social marketing challenge for organizations in this study was measuring ROI.  Organizations are unable to determine how much they are actually getting out of their work with social media and are unsure how to measure it.

One other key point made was that 50% of the respondents in this study wanted tighter integration between social and the rest of their marketing department.  That means that only half of the organizations wanted social media to be its own department and the other half wants it to be a closer entity

Most marketers are yet to tap into the true potential of social media.  Only 16% of marketers who responded to the survey are currently using a Social CRM system, while another 21% plan on using it by year's end.  This will provide insight for marketers to be more effective and efficient in this social age.

Lastly, social marketing budgets and resources are too insufficient to drive real value.  54% of respondents in this study said that they do not have an allocated budget for social marketing and are relying on human resources.  With a low budget, it is difficult to drive a high revenue.

Social CRM- Social CRM is customer relationship management within social marketing.

Social targeting- Targeting certain audiences based on research of behaviors in order to engage with users.

Tight Integration- Centralizing departments in an organization into one entity.

This article did give me some insight I did not know about on organization's use of social media.  I did not realize how much research has been done based on ROI with social media.  Most of the points in this article were for businesses and how they use and should be using social media.  For my social media marketing plan, I am promoting awareness and not actually selling a product.  However, reading more information on Social CRM will only help with me trying to enlarge my audience.