How do the biggest and most successful corporations spend on social business? We aimed to find out.
These “wealthy” (which deemed by annual revenues) corporations spend comparatively more on customer facing social business efforts than most other corporations, yet the overall subtotal of spending is significantly small. First, recognize that social business has only been formalized in programs for about two and a half years (data), and most companies are intermediate but not advanced. The following data is of companies with over $10 billion dollars in revenues per year, and their expected spend as reported by the Corporate Social Strategist. This data is a cut from our recent reports on Social Business Spending, and clients can receive additional data from us as needed.
What You Should Know:
- Across nearly all efforts, the wealthy (deemed by revenues) spend over double than the average corporation in social business. This is in alignment with Altimeter’s Engagement DB study which shows a strong correlation (not causation) between how corporations are engaged with their customers and the size of company.
- These corporations spend significantly more on internal staff to manage, more than any other program, which is in line with this labor intensive program to get internal teams organized as well as to manage communities, blogs, advocacy programs. Sadly, the training and education programs to train this staff and line of business is incredibly low, under $70,000.
- Secondly, there’s a significant spend on advertising, which is often deemed a scalable marketing effort as you can just ‘throw dollars’ at it and hope to get a conversion return –without having to engage with customers in costly dialog.
- These wealthy corporations are spending slightly more on traditional agencies, yet social media boutiques are still grabbing a lion’s share over $221k per year and growing. To learn more how boutiques are evolving over traditional, read this data.
- In the software category, there’s continued spend on recurring SaaS providers like Brand Monitoring, Community Platforms (both nearly achieving 300k annual spending), and then programs to integrate and customize this content.
Average Spending on Social Business Companies by Companies with Over $10 Billion in Revenue:
Related Open Research
If this data was helpful, see our other research reports and data releases tied to this data
Thanks for sharing the info. For small companies that do not posses the resources this type of article provides great research. Keep up the great work and research.
This might be telling us that the social startups’ revenue are still very limited, at the moment at least.
Interesting material as usual, Jeremiah. Thank you for it.
Has Altimeter compared organizations’ spending on social media-based marketing with that on traditional forms? It might be revealing to see if the ratio between the two also varies by organization size.
Roger
Very interesting as always – were the costs listed the whole costs of product or purely software/consulting?
Thanks Jeremiah,
The question wasn’t focussed on any individual item – I was more curious if the numbers came from purely external resources or both internal/external.
Messy indeed! It will be interesting to see the next generation of BI tools that emerge to handle this… is the total customer dashboard on it’s way?
> We’re focused on disruptive technologies and are not comparing it right now to the traditional forms of marketing.
But unless you know whether they’re producing markedly different results from traditional methods, you can’t know whether these technologies /are/ disruptive. To do that, you need a baseline of results from those older methods.
Without that information. all you can know is that these new methods are just that, new.