A Social Media Examiner report has revealed a strong preference for this specific network in advertising.
Nearly every social network – including the current reigning king, Facebook, as well as Twitter and LinkedIn – have entered into a massive advertising war around the world, as each one attempts to become the leader in social media marketing.
This highly lucrative advertising channel has turned into a fierce battleground for brands of all size.
Marketers have been considerably increasing their social media marketing activities over the various different networking websites in order to be able to acquire new customers and maintain relationships with existing ones. Now, Social Media Examiner has published a document authored by Michael A. Steltzner entitled “2014 Social Media Marketing Industry Report”, which involved an analysis of a massive global study.
This social media marketing study involved the participation of 2,800 marketers around the globe.
Among them, 92 percent felt that the use of social media for advertising purpose was considered to be critical for their businesses. This is a meaningful increase over the 2013 figure, which was 86 percent. Of the respondents, 89 percent felt that it was important for them to learn various different types of tactics that would allow them to use these channels for better results from their various ad campaigns.
Facebook was by far the “most important marketing platform”, as 54 percent of the survey respondents labeled it as such. In a very second place was LinkedIn, which was deemed most important by 17 percent of the respondents. Another 12 percent felt that Twitter was the most important. Not only is this good news for Facebook, on its own, but it also represents meaningful growth over last year’s figures, at which time only 40 percent felt that this social network was the most important for marketing.
In fourth place in terms of overall social media marketing was blogging, which was the top vote of only 8 percent of the participants in the survey. While some analysts have been predicting an impending death of Facebook, it appears as though the network is continuing to hold its own for the moment.
However, a study shows that there are more people who value it than are actually using it.
Recent research is indicating that female business owners are feeling quite optimistic, overall, about the way that their companies will be performing over the upcoming year, and that many of them feel that social media marketing could play a notable role in helping to enhance outcomes.
That said, a surprising number of women business owners are not using this technique, despite the value they assign it.
The research from the National Association of Women Business Owners and Web.com Group, Inc., showed that 89 percent of women feel that their business performance will be positive throughout this year. This is an increase of 8 percent over the figures that were registered last year when women business owners were asked the same question. Among those who participated in the survey, most said that social media marketing was important for building relationships with customers.
In fact, 85 percent of women business owners felt that social media marketing was important for this purpose.
However, at the same time that this vast majority expressed that they felt this way, only 67 percent of this same group said that they were currently using one of the social networks in order to connect with customers. At the same time, only slightly over half felt strong enough in their ability to build a presence over social media in order to achieve this goal. When all was said and done, only about one in every four female business owners are posting comments at least one time per day.
Among those that were posting over social media, the preferred site was also surprising. Although Facebook is by far the largest social network and it receives the highest amount of traffic, it was still used by only 21 percent of the respondents. LinkedIn had the top spot at 25 percent. This could suggest either that women prefer the latter network or it could also indicate that many of the survey participants were marketing business to business – for which LinkedIn would be the top choice.
This year could be a defining one for social media marketing, as the perception of its value continues to rise, but at a greater rate than its adoption among this demographic.
