I’ve read plenty of articles about ways to measure the success of the Social Media campaigns that companies employ, but have not yet looked into how much companies actually utilize this channel over other more traditional ones.  TechnoratiMedia published the results of a survey earlier this year that investigated this very subject, entitled the “2013 Digital Influence Report”.  This survey was completed by 6,000 influencers, 1,200 consumers, and 150 top brand marketers, and provides valuable insight into where companies are investing their Marketing budgets and which online mediums provide the best bang for the buck (in terms of level of influence).

First let’s get grounded on the actual dollars we are talking about.  From the below figure pulled from the TechnoratiMedia report, we can see just how much top brand marketers spend in the Digital channel.  In my experience, it is difficult to repurpose a firms’ traditional channel spend towards new digital initiatives.  This can be a long and drawn out process, but the spend figures in the below table are already classified as digital and we can safely assume that these figures will only increase over time.  Amount spent will obviously vary depending on the size of the firm, but we can see here that we are talking about substantial investment going into the digital channel in 2013.

Now for the interesting part – the report further breaks down the digital bucket into various components, and as can be seen in the below chart, just 10% of this is going towards Social Media at this time.  Display ads account for the majority of digital spend, and this may be because it is the oldest form of advertising in this relatively new world.  I would assume that over time the Social, Mobile, and Search pieces will increase more and more, and new forums will become available that do not exist today.

The above chart also breaks down the Social Media spend into subcomponents, and from this is where the most interesting finding of the TechnoratiMedia report is found.  Facebook is getting by far the largest piece of the Social Media investment pie at 57%, while Blogs receive just 6%.  However when we look at which forums actually influence consumers purchase decisions (as seen in the consumer chart to the right), both of these are tied at 31% response rate.  This strikes me as a very significant piece of information.  It seems that while Facebook is important, Blogs can be equally as effective at what is likely a fraction of the cost.  My learning from this report is that marketers should consider investing more heavily in specifically targeted blogs to get to the influencers, as these are the groups that are impacting the consumers decision to make a purchase.