Facebook is the marketer’s best friend, at least in the United Kingdom.
According to a survey of 171 UK social marketers, Facebook is the favored platform for social media campaign development and evaluation. The survey was conducted by the Social Media Council of the London-based Direct Marketing Assn. in September and the results were released this week.
Survey participants were asked to rate each social network from 1 to 10 in campaign planning, execution and post-campaign analysis. Facebook ranked highest in each, with a 4.8 score for planning, a 4.5 (tied with Twitter) for execution, and 3.9 for analysis. Notably, in the planning portion of the survey, LinkedIn ranked highest with a 5.2 for tools to target individual users.
Because the survey was carried out last September, the participants hadn’t yet been exposed to the current angst about plunging organic reach for Facebook Page posts.
I also think that the fact that the scores were low overall — leaders barely pushed into theaverage level — is an indication that marketers are not satisfied with the tools available. In that view, Facebook is the best of an iffy bunch.
Conclusion
“For now, Facebook is the best social media platform in terms of functionality and post-campaign analysis but it will be interesting to see how this will change over the next 12 months,” said Lynsey Sweales, CEO of SocialB UK and member of the DMA Social Media Council. “Only a handful of the marketers in the survey (fewer than 25) were using image and video-based platforms such as Pinterest, Instagram, Vimeo and Snapchat, which is why the results aren’t included here. But I’m sure that our next survey will see more of these newcomers making an impact.”
The full infographic report can be viewed below or downloaded here (PDF).
