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.
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.
ARelated Open Research
If this data was helpful, see our other research reports and data releases tied to this data
Report: Career Path of the Corporate Social Strategist
Report: How Corporations Should Spend on Social Business (Chock full of data)
How Boutique Social Agencies are Overtaking Traditional Agencies
Altimeter’s Engagement DB study