NEW SURVEY REVEALS HOW MARKETERS ARE USING SOCIAL MEDIA IN 2012, PLUS HUBSPOT'S REVEALING INFOGRAPHIC

SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin and HubSpot CTO Dharmesh Shah reveal the results from the SEOmoz annual industry survey on the state of SEO and internet marketing.

The survey specifically aimed to highlight the state of search engine optimization, internet marketing, and the marketing profession in 2012, and SEOmoz shared this exclusive data with us in order to reveal some key insights about social media usage.   So if you're wondering how marketers are leveraging social media for their businesses, Hubspot pulled together an infographic snapshot (see below) to feature some of results from the 6,491 SEOmoz survey respondents.  

The first statistic highlighted on our infographic reveals that 44.4% of survey respondents self-professed either “advanced” or “expert” level social media ability. This shows that marketers are feeling an increased sense of ability to tackle what was once thought of as a new and unknown technology.

To little surprise in the social media marketing world, Facebook and Twitter lead as the most popular social network. In fact, the social media lead generation team at HubSpot is a big advocate for these two networks!  What is surprising, however, is that Google+ emerges as the third most popular network. Google+ has historically been plagued with the "useless" label when it comes to generating social ROI, so one theory behind this ranking could be the high impact Google+ has on SEO.

While LinkedIn falls behind in fifth place, it turns out that 74.1% of marketers use LinkedIn for branding. I found this to be particularly interesting since LinkedIn Company Pages do not provide many options for branding. While they can update their status and add a company logo, marketers don't have the more advanced branding capabilities that they have on more visual networks such as Facebook or Pinterest. One theory behind this statistic could be branding via employees. LinkedIn is an excellent platform for showing off the wonderful talent your employees bring to your company.

Lastly, it turns out that 60.2% of marketers are looking for analysis options, as well as other analytics options, in their social media management tools. This comes as no surprise. When savvy social media marketers are communicating their messages online, they want to know exactly how those efforts are benefiting them by analyzing whether each social strategy is connecting to their end goal: revenue. Tools that report on social media analytics are becoming more and more in demand among marketers, which is exactly why the HubSpot team has worked so hard to provide reach metrics and CTR on all your social media messages, as well as ROI metrics like closed-loop reporting on leads and customers generated from social media, all within the HubSpot Social Media tool.

Courtesy of an article dated August 20, 2012 appearing in Hubspot Blog

Comments

[PageMax SEO]

Network Marketers have understood early on the viral power of Social Media and the potential it carries in driving traffic to their online sales letters. The one thing though, that an overwhelming 99% of online marketers didn't understand is that Social Media is not a free advertising billboard where they could constantly pitch their business opportunity and products.

[Darryl Tay]

Social media is like a vast ocean full of different kinds of fish. It’s just the right place to market your product since it provides an avenue to where you can easily connect with your target market. Plus, social networking sites, like those that are listed in the infographic, enable “word of mouth” to endorse a certain product/business – a matter that goes further than what advertising alone does.

[Sam Ketters]

That’s a great site you folks have been carrying out there.