By Ron Starner
Executive Vice President of Conway Data Inc.
They haven’t launched any home runs yet, but economic developers are stepping up to the plate and taking some pretty big swings when it comes to social media.
In fact, investment in social media is second only to spending on websites in total marketing budget expenditures these days for economic development organizations, according to a comprehensive survey conducted last month by Site Selection magazine publisher Conway Data.
While 84 percent of the 101 survey respondents said they are investing marketing dollars into their websites, 49 percent said they are spending marketing money on social media – topping email marketing (46 percent), print advertising (43 percent) and online advertising (31 percent).
However, just 1 percent of all respondents said that their “biggest economic development success” came from social media. Thirty-five percent said their largest success came from networking; 28 percent said “they found us,” and 8 percent said that their biggest success came through their website.
The survey yields some broad implications for chief marketing officers of EDOs. Among the most significant findings:
- 75 percent of all EDOs are using social media as a regular part of their promotions.
- Facebook (88 percent), Twitter (71 percent), LinkedIn (68 percent) and YouTube (50 percent) are the four most-used platforms for social media marketing by EDOs.
- Building awareness is the primary objective for using social media, according to 82 percent of the survey respondents.
- Most EDOs use social media to promote local accomplishments (75 percent), local events (71 percent) and local businesses (68 percent).
- Only 35 percent of all EDOs have any kind of social media policy in place.
The survey, conducted in early February by Conway Data, targeted a global audience of economic development professionals and grew out of an in-depth discussion on social media at the Lake Rabun, Ga., meeting of the Janus Forum in August 2013.
That discussion was facilitated by Amanda Sutt of Rock Paper Scissors in Lawrenceville, Ga., and Jessica Hayslett of The Hayslett Group in Atlanta – two noted social media experts who regularly advise marketers for EDOs.
They strongly encouraged all EDOs to get more aggressive in using social media as a marketing tool and to adopt metrics to measure those tools’ effectiveness. They also advised EDOs to adopt a social media policy as a way to prevent abuse or misuse of various social media platforms.
Along those lines, about 19 percent of the survey respondents said that they had already had a “negative social media experience.”
Platforms to watch moving forward, say Sutt and Hayslett, are up-and-coming tools like MeetUp, Vimeo, StumbleUpon, Tumblr and Vine. While none of these are widely adopted just yet, they soon will be, the experts say.
In the meantime, it’s best to know what your competition is doing to stay ahead of the game. For a more detailed report on the social media marketing survey of economic development organizations, look for the Janus Forum Journal, set for publication soon.
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