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Marketing
Marketers’ Top Questions on Social Media
The 2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report from Social Media Examiner has been released, answering questions about what’s on the mind of 3,000 marketers when it comes to social media marketing. Lee Odden over at TopRank blog, breaks the report down into 5 top questions:
- What social tactics are most effective? – 90%
- What are the best ways to engage my audience with social media? – 88%
- How do I measure the return on my social media investment? – 87%
- What are the best social management tools? – 84%
- How do I create a social strategy? – 83%
These questions are interesting because the industry is evolving so quickly — keeping up on trends and tactics is vital to recognizing the breadth of what may be possible for a particular industry and organization. Also, what works for one company, may not work for another, but sharing can lead to new ideas. Other than super standout executions, there could be more sharing by marketers in terms of what has worked and what hasn’t. The other questions — measurement, tools and strategy — all flow from wanting to know the best ways to use social media to help the organization reach its objectives.
What questions do you have about social media?
Big Data is the Next Gold Mine
Cloud services and software as a service are flourishing. IT departments are freed from having to support hardware and software infrastructure, and users get the latest software updates. But the backend of these types of services is the data that they are able to collect. By being able to view a spectrum of users across many different industries and uses, many companies are able to collect valuable marketing data that is not directly related to the services they are providing. The use of this data may be helpful for individuals as companies are able to leverage it to make a better match between want and need. The value of this information to marketers is clear. Will companies and individuals be willing to contribute to this type of data collection, especially when most are blissfully unaware? Time will tell.
The other reason is that the big part of big data really is important if you want to get a really clear picture of what’s happening in any given space. While no single end-user company can (or likely would) address search-engine optimization, for example, by building a massive store comprised of data from hundreds or thousands of companies as well as the entire web, a cloud service dedicated to that specific task can. — This is why big data is the sweet spot for SaaS by Derrick Harris