HOW TO: Optimize Your Social Media Budget

As marketers focus on optimizing their social media programs this year, return on investment is going to be a huge consideration. As a result, marketers will — and should — take a more calculated approach towards budgeting for social marketing initiatives. Prioritizing spending on particular social activities, though, is a task that hasn’t quite been mastered by most companies.

Analyst Jeremiah Owyang and Founder Charlene Li of digital strategy consulting firm Altimeter Group, released a report on Thursday about “How Corporations Should Prioritize Social Business Budgets.” In short, the report concludes that budgets should be based on the maturity level of a corporation’s social business programs.

Altimeter interviewed 140 corporate social strategists to create a standard for categorizing programs into novice, intermediate and advanced maturity levels.

When asked about their programs, about half of respondents identified their programs as intermediate, while the rest were almost equally split between novice and advanced. The below graph is an overview of the priorities that each type of program should focus on. Read on for a more in-depth look at these goals.

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