Twitter and blogs are hot with companies, but they aren’t sure how to measure their efforts

As promised, here are the results from my recent survey on how companies are using social media.  Over 200 of you responded to this survey,  and thank you SO much for doing so!  I’ll be digging into the results and takeaways a bit more over the coming weeks, but for today I wanted to give you a broad overview of what we learned.  Here are some of the key takeaways from the 230 of you that responded to the survey:

89.6% of your companies are currently using social media.

The most effective tool for your companies is Twitter, according to 35.7% of respondents.

The biggest problem concerning social media your companies have encountered is being able to measure the effectiveness of your efforts.

First, here are the sizes of the companies that responded:

As you can see, most of the companies that responded were smaller businesses.  That may also play into the responses given to this question about how much their company spends on social media:

The most popular response to the question about your company’s current social media budget was Less than $1,000, which was selected by 35.7% of respondents.  This makes sense, as most of the respondents appear to be small businesses.  What I found fascinating is that 15.2% of respondents said they had NO budget for social media!  Of course 13.5% also said they weren’t sure what their company’s budget for social media was.

Now I think the responses to these next three questions do contribute to each other to a degree, and I’ll delve into this more starting on Thursday.  But for now, I’ll let you mull over the results for yourself:

When it came to which social media tool has worked best for your companies, the Big Three of Twitter(35.7%), Blogs(21.3%) and Facebook18.7%) led the way, but I was a bit surprised to see that the 4th most popular tool (at 3.9%) was message boards and forums focused on your company’s industry.

Now for a biggie; The biggest issue or problem your companies are having with social media:

Let me break down the numbers for each response:

Not sure how to measure the effectiveness of our efforts – 33%

Can’t get customers interacting with us – 19.8%

Can’t devote time to social media – 15.7%

Don’t know where to spend our time/focus our efforts – 10.7%

We don’t know how to budget for it in terms of people or money – 9.1%

Can’t see how social media is helping our business – 7.1%

We don’t know what tools to use, there are so many! – 3.6%

We can’t handle more customer complaints – 1%

I won’t get into my takeaways or conclusions of these results till the next post, but it will give you something to think about for now.

Finally, I asked the companies that do NOT current have a social media strategy, to explain why not, here’s the responses to that question:

Note that 62.1% of the respondents to this question said their company IS using social media, but does NOT have a social media strategy in place to guide their efforts (insert nails on chalkboard HERE).  This is a key stat that I want to really drill down into and see what else is happening with these people.  What is their biggest problem with social media?  Which tool are they using the most?  I’ll get into much of that in my next post.

Finally, 9.1% of respondents said they outsource some or all of their social media efforts, and the form of promotion that companies are spending the most money on besides social media is online advertising (27.4%), followed by print (15.7%), direct mail (11.7%), television advertising (4.8%), radio advertising (2.2%) and bringing up the rear, billboard advertising at 0.9%.  The most popular answer to this question was ‘Other’ at 37.4%, and if I had to do it again I would have added SEO as another option.

So thanks again to all of you that participated, this was my first social media survey, and I was very pleased with the level of response.  BTW I created a short PDF on Handling Negative Comments for this survey, and gave respondents a sneak peek at it a couple of weeks ago, but if you would like to download a copy, you can find it here.

So please let me know what you think of these results, via here in the comments, or by emailing me.  And BTW if you responded to the survey that you are having difficulty with your social media efforts, whether it’s figuring out what to use, how to get a strategy in place, or just to figure out if social media can actually help your company, please email me and I’d love to talk to your company about how I can help you get your social media efforts on track!