The Marketing Bureau

First Published on www.mycustomer.com  

Over half of businesses fail to see the benefits of social media and claim it provides little valuable market or competitor intelligence, according to a new report. 

The Chartered Institute of Marketing surveyed 1,500 businesses worldwide to reveal that one in five brands believe they are ill-equipped to convert social media into business, with only a quarter of firms planning to address this lack of competency.

Although a third of respondents said they are experimenting with social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube – they are failing to generate value from their strategy, says the report.

Twitter was the most used social tool with 47% of marketers updating the site once a day and receiving the most investment, according to the study. Two thirds of respondents claimed to use the platform, compared with 56% using Facebook, 53% LinkedIn and 41% using YouTube, and 81% of marketers plan to increase their spend on the site.

Senior management emerged as the cynics of social media use with only a third of those surveyed believing that top employees understand its importance.

The report also highlighted that a third of the time social media is used to promote a specific campaign rather than form an ongoing function to generate new business.

Thomas Brown, from The Chartered Institute of Marketing, said: "2012 is supposed to be the year in which business use of social media matures, but these results show that we’re a long way away from this at the moment. A major concern is that only one third of marketers strongly believe that the social media channels have potential as a tool to help their businesses grow – which is somewhat at odds with businesses’ growing investment. In times of economic turbulence, marketers will need to build a more robust rationale to justify long term investment in these channels.

He added: "In the coming year, businesses will also need to address the widespread skills gap that this survey has uncovered. The gap between businesses that perform well on social media and those that don’t will widen dramatically in 2012 and if companies fail to invest in the skills, time and training necessary, they will find themselves left even further behind in a medium that they themselves admit is here to stay. The true sign of social media maturity in business will be when it is treated as just another channel, with its own characteristics and skills requirements."