A Blueprint to Help Companies Fully Capitalize on Social Media Investments

Social media sounds tantalizing to a marketer: direct access to millions of potential customers, actively engaged with the medium, who can be easily profiled, segmented, and tracked. All that promise has brands continuing to increase their investment in social. However, the gap between social media’s potential and the actual results it’s producing lingers. According to the 2020 CMO Survey, conducted semiannually by Duke University professor and Journal of Marketing editor Christine Moorman with more than 2,500 senior U.S. marketing executives, companies expect their social media spending to rise by 62% over five years, and yet respondents rate social media contributions to corporate performance as decidedly middling—an average 3.4 on a 1 to 7 scale. This reality isn’t new, either; that figure has remained flat for the past four years.