Facebook âmost marketing friendlyâ social platform, new research reveals

Facebook has emerged as the marketer’s preferred social platform for campaign development and evaluation, according to a poll of 171 UK social marketers.

The DMA’s inaugural Social media scorecard asked marketers to mark the top social media platforms in the three key areas of campaign planning, execution and post-campaign analysis. Facebook emerged as the marketer’s favoured platform in each of the three categories.

The DMA’s Social Media Council created theSocial media scorecard to benchmark factors such as ease of use, ability to target users, contact objectives like brand awareness, and quality of analytical tools to give marketers a clearer picture on the relative qualities of the leading social platforms to help their planning decisions.

Facebook came out on top overall in the three main categories, pushing LinkedIn and Twitter into second and third places, and YouTube and Google+ into fourth and fifth places. However, within the categories Twitter emerged as the marketer’s preferred platform for its effectiveness in building brand awareness and LinkedIn as the best platform for its user targeting tools.

Commenting on the findings, Lynsey Sweales, member of the DMA Social Media Council and CEO of SocialB UK, said;

“The Social media scorecard is crucial for marketers to make an informed decision when choosing social platforms for their campaign. ROI metrics do not give marketers a full picture of the other factors they must take into account.

“For now, Facebook is the most marketing friendly 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. Only a handful of the marketers who took part in the survey were using image and video-based platforms such as Pinterest, Instagram, Vimeo and Snapchat, which is why the results aren't included in the scorecard.”

According to the latest figures from the IAB UK social media marketing spend hit £588.4m in 2013, a 71% increase from 2012.

The DMA Social Media Council’s Social media scorecard infographic can be downloaded from the DMA’s website: dma.org.uk/socialmediascorecard

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Notes to Editors

About the Social media scorecard

The DMA Social Media Council ran the Social media scorecard survey in September 2013. Marketers from DMA UK’s database were asked to score social media platforms that they have used out of 10. They scored the platforms on their capability to offer campaign planning, execution and optimisation solutions.

The scores marketers gave these profiles depended upon their own knowledge of the different functions social media platforms have to offer, their experience of using those functions and the results they had on their marketing campaigns.

Contact

Ed Owen, Head of PR
Tel. 020 7291 3324
Email ed.owen@dma.org.uk