Social media is the latest avenue for online marketers. Although most marketers are convinced about the impact of social media, still a lot of confusion exists surrounding how to extract the maximum advantage from it. A recent survey conducted on issues faced by marketers in social media marketing came up with some insightful results.
Social media is typically considered as a cheap and effective way of marketing as promotion by creating a profile or a page on any social channel is free of cost. Marketers have now started realizing that although there are very less externally perceivable costs, the cost of time and resources spent on this channel could still be substantial.
In the survey, 41.6% social media marketers cited time or resource allocation as the biggest issues faced by them, 20.9% stated unavailability of clear-cut measures to calculate return on investment as the biggest problem and 12.2% felt presence of too many platforms in social media was a big problem.
On being questioned about the biggest mistake in social media marketing, again the top answer at 37.8% was failure in allocation of adequate time and resources. 29.7% marketers cited not having a concrete strategy as the biggest mistake, while 22.3% felt that not having well defined objectives was the biggest mistake.
It is clear from the results of the survey that marketers need to get more organized about their social media efforts. They need to set clear objectives and a carefully thought out plan to maximize the effectiveness of their efforts on this important channel.