• by Sean Hargrave , Staff Writer, December 16, 2015

Social needs to grow up. That's what marketers have been saying for a good couple of years now, and it's exactly what they've said again in the latest research to come out of IAB UK. Nearly a third of marketers do not believe social plays an important role in marketing, and so it may come as little surprise that less than half of social campaigns (43%) are integrated into wider marketing initiatives and that half of brands don't bother to measure the channel's ROI.

Thus, when you get the top three brands that are named as doing well on social, Coca-Cola, Nike and Virgin are agreed on by 20%, 15% and 12% of respondents. The percentages then drop very quickly to low single figures of approval for the rest of a top ten. Indeed, to make the top 10, Amazon, the BBC and British Airways (in a three-way tie for eighth place) only needed to be cited by just under one in twenty respondents. Not the biggest vote of confidence in the channel, it must be said. 

This prompted the IAB UK to refer to the channel as a "teenager" because it has a lot of work to do in convincing the marketing industry it is a channel that can be taken seriously. However, the industry group points out that with a third of companies expecting to spend a fifth more on social, then "adulthood" might be fast approaching.

How you get from a channel that a third don't truly believe in -- probably because it's not integrated into marketing initiatives and it doesn't have its ROI probed -- is a mystery. It's also all the more pressing an issue because the IAB UK also points out that around 45% of social campaigns and activity are now being paid for. In the words of a certain farm girl with ruby slippers, that puts us a long way from Kansas. When social was a nice-to-have freebie extra that got a few clicks and likes for putting up a funny photo or a special offer, it was never going to have to try too hard to warrant its existence. However, when you reach a point where nearly half of all activity is being paid for, then marketing metrics such as click-throughs and likes need to be joined pretty soon with an ROI figure. At the very least, the 40% currently measuring leads and conversions from social activity needs to get way above the 50% mark, and begin to reach a point where those who do not properly scrutinise the channel are a small minority.

So none of this is actually incredibly new. The figures are, and they're very helpful, but the message that social needs to validate not only its existence but now also its requests for budget to pay for commercial programmes has been around for quite some time.

Whenever I go into a conference room and a brand promises to say what social is worth to them and how the have measured its ROI, I always roll my eyes. They never deliver on that promise. We get a discussion about what has worked and what has not and how a video or two went viral with some budget behind it. You very rarely get an example you can really latch onto, such as people who saw our post on a product offer were x times as likely to buy as those who did not. I have yet to hear a brand say for every dollar we put into social we get back x dollars.

The game has shifted now. Social is a paid channel like any other, and IAB UK is right to call it a teenager that thinks it's OK to ask for an allowance without getting down to what it is needed for or what it has done to deserve it. If it were my teenager, it would be grounded -- at least until it knew how to justify some extra money for the weekend with a grown up discussion of what the money's going on and what it will earn.