Make social media part of your marketing budget

This article first appeared May 18, 2011.

A survey from Nielsen showed that almost three quarters of Australian businesses are dedicating 10% of their budgets to social media marketing.

If you are not included in this 75%, then you probably need to think about why you are not.

While most smart start-ups have established themselves on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube, many treat this as an add-on to their budgeted marketing efforts.

As such, marketing using social media becomes something one person does in their spare time. It isn’t properly resourced and it certainly isn’t measured.

But formally dedicating part of the marketing budget to social media has benefits. It says this social marketing is a real and important strategy and it can help to ensure your efforts are piecemeal.

Some of the things you might dedicate resources to include:

• Special social-media-only promotions or advertisements.
• Time for a staff member to spend responding to social media posts.
• Improved content (perhaps written or edited by a professional).
• Measurement tools.
• The automation of social media fields.

Social media is now too big not to take seriously – and that means putting it in the budget.

Get it done – today!