Most Marketers Keep Social Media In-house

Roughly seven in 10 (72%) marketers who engage in social media marketing efforts do not outsource those efforts, according to the “2011 Social Media Marketing Report” from SocialMedia Examiner. However, SocialMedia Examiner notes the number of those who are outsourcing social media efforts has doubled since 2010, from 14% to 28%.

Design/Development Most Often Outsourced

Among marketers who do outsource social media marketing efforts, the most commonly outsourced task is design/development, which 17% say they outsource. MarketingCharts observes that the other most commonly outsourced tasks, such as content creation (10%) and analytics (10%), can also be considered “behind the scenes” functions. “Real time” functions such as community management (4%) and live tweeting (3%) are less likely to be outsourced.

8 in 10 Social Marketers Use Email

The study asked social media marketers what other types of marketing they were participating in. The top three included email marketing (81%), search engine optimization (68%) and event marketing (64%).
SocialMedia Examiner analysis indicates B2B marketers were significantly more likely to employ search engine optimization (71% B2B compared to 65% B2C) and event marketing (70% B2B compared to 58% B2C). Organizations with 1,000 or more employees were more likely to participate in event marketing (73%).
In addition, social media marketers with three or more years of experience were more likely to participate in search engine optimization (80%) and event marketing (79%) than the overall respondent group.

9 in 10 Marketers Use Facebook

Nine in 10 marketers (92%) use the Facebook social network as a marketing tool, according to other study results. Data indicates Facebook is the most popular social network among marketers by a wide margin. The second-most-popular social network among marketers, Twitter, has an 84% adoption rate, meaning Facebook is almost 10% more popular than its closest competitor as a marketing tool.
The professional networking site LinkedIn comes in third with 71% marketer adoption. Rather than a specific network, blogs follow with 68% usage, and YouTube/other video sites are used by 56% of marketers.
There is a substantial dropoff of more than 50% between the marketer adoption rates of YouTube/other video sites and their closest competitor, social bookmarking/news sites, used by only 26% of marketers. MySpace comes in last with only 6% adoption as a marketing tool.
About the Data: In January 2011, SocialMedia Examiner posted a survey link on Twitter, which was reposted on other social media networks including Facebook and LinkedIn. SocialMedia Examiner also emailed a list of 50,000 marketers. After 10 days, the survey was closed with 3,342 participants.