This poll analysis was written by Jeremy Victor, editor-in-chief of B2Bbloggers.com. For more of his writing, visit B2Bbloggers.com and follow him on Twitter or Google+.
SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Social Media — tracks feedback from leading marketers about social media practices and issues.
Our poll this week: For 2012, what do you plan to do with your social media budget? The results:
- Increase: 56.67%
- Stay the same: 36.67%
- Decrease: 6.67%
What a resounding vote of affirmation for social media and its growing place of permanence in our budgets and businesses. If we are learning anything about social media, it is that being successful requires an investment of both time and resources. And more than 93% of you are investing more or staying the course this coming year as you strive to generate greater benefits from being social.
For those decreasing your investment, I understand that too. As we know, while many of the tools of social media don’t cost any money, there are both hard costs, such as time spent, and opportunity costs associated with social media. When times are tight, if you can’t go all in, the best decision may be to scale back and only bite off what you can chew.
For a further look at 2012’s budget trends (in social media and beyond), enjoy this digital-marketing infographic from 6S Marketing. Click the image to view it at full size.
How are you allocating your 2012 social media budgets? How will you be shifting your resources between various social media platforms?
Image credit: 6S Marketing
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Good Infographics! Since the social media is growing better to increase the budge for the year 2012.
These services are particularly important in Tourism Marketing. Many businesses are establishing social media profiles, but most are still struggling to get results because they have failed to develop specific content and engagement strategies for each of the social platforms.
My recent post Ever Wonder How Twitter Could Help Your Tourism Business?
As we invest more in social media based marketing we should expect to also invest more in customer care and customer service activities. We can't expect to just "market to" our audience, we need to be geared up to deal with support requests, complaints, comments. Most critical will be ensuring that any wall-posts/comments on Facebook pages and tweets are responded to in the most rapid way possible. After all our Facebook pages and Twitter streams are public faces of our company. Too many companies ignore their customers on Facebook and Twitter which undermines the whole marketing spend. I'm working with a company that provides software for managing customer conversations on Facebook and Twitter. They have recently done research into how responsive various retail companies' are to customer interactions. The results are very telling about the consequences of not connecting with customers who post directly on your wall. http://www.conversocial.comtorage/resources…
[...] all the buzz about social media and the Internet for vacation planning, one might forget about the awesome power of meeting people [...]