It appears as many as 89% of content marketers used social media 11 times a week on average. Among the 11% not engaged in the social media, 38% planned to make up for that loss next year. What was the main reason to use the social media? Obviously, interaction with the customer, including responses to customers’ comments on Facebook. Despite content marketers exploring the social media broadly, half of the respondents (51%) did not have a formal strategic plan for their marketing activities. In 57% the content for the social media was planned four weeks in advance or less, while 23% did not use content planned in advance at all. The most popular medium was the text (60%), followed by pics (21%) and videos (12%). All the respondents were using the most popular social media tools: Facebook, Google+ and Linkedln, slightly less popular being the microblogging channels – 77% (Twitter, Tumblr); video – 68% (YouTube, Vimeo) and photo sharing platforms – 41% (Pinterest, Flickr). Mobile marketing was still in the initial stage of content development. The research showed that two leading strategies include optimising e-mails on mobile devices and the use of mobile advertising campaigns.
Most of the marketers claimed that social media ROI (return on investment) was very good (10%), good (36%) or moderate (42%). What’s important, 89% of the respondents reported a steady or rapid growth of that index.

Meanwhile, one of the most important social media channels – mainly Facebook – introduced changes to its terms of use in 2013, which are important for brand communication. It is worth reminding them. Currently we can: as a fun page, publish competitions and their rules directly in the post; accept users’ applications for a competition via their comments, likes, posts (on fan page wall); use likes as a voting mechanism; edit posts/status after their publication on the wall, but beware – the history of changes and their authors is available for users.