Online

For the third consecutive year, YouTube is the channel where most marketers plan on increasing their social media efforts, according to survey results from Social Media Examiner's latest annual "Social Media Marketing Report" [download page].This year, 69% plan to increase their YouTube marketing efforts in the near future, while another 17% plan to maintain current levels, and just 13% don't have any plans to utilize the platform. Last year, 76% planned to increase their YouTube efforts, against 33% who didn't plan any such marketing activities, while the year before, 77% planned to increase their efforts versus 10% who had no YouTube marketing plans. But YouTube adoption has remained flat: it stood at 56% in 2011, 57% in 2012, and is once again at 56% this year. Read more »

Data-driven marketing spending is on the rise, according to respondents to the Direct Marketing Association's Quarterly Business Review covering Q1 2013. 38.7% of respondents indicated that their spending increased quarter-over-quarter, with another 41.9% reporting a steady level of spending. On a 5-point scale, where 5 indicates a significant increase in spend from the prior quarter, data-driven marketers averaged out at a score of 3.19, up from 3.1 in Q4 2012 and 3.16 in Q3. In turn, 45.9% enjoyed revenue increases from their activities for the quarter, with another 39.4% indicating that revenues stayed flat. Read more »

70% of brands and 77% of agencies have employed branded content marketing for advertising purposes in the past year, and about two-thirds of each group say that branded content marketing has become very or most important to their marketing mix, according to a MailOnline survey of more than 600 online marketing and advertising executives. With branded content now perceived by brands as being among their most effective branding tactics, 72% report having increased their spending on it in the past year, and 69% plan to pour more money into branded content in the coming year. Read more »

Twitter says its Promoted Tweets are working, but Twitter users may hold slightly less positive attitudes towards ads on the platform: just 1 in 10 find Twitter ads such as Promoted Tweets to be "very effective," although another 45% find them to be "somewhat effective," according to survey results from Ask Your Target Market (AYTM). But, those numbers go up among users who watch video clips within expanded tweets (including those from Vine and YouTube): 20% of this group thinks Twitter ads are very effective, and 61% think they're somewhat effective. Read more »

Executives at large companies (more than $500 million in revenues) who rate themselves highly in terms of their capability to use data analytics, deploy applications, and operate APIs are more likely than those who rate themselves poorly in those capabilities to have confidence in their future competitive position, according to [pdf] results from an Apigee Institute survey. These top digital performers also are more likely to report having outperformed their competitors in the past year across a range of factors, such as bringing new products to market and customer satisfaction. Read more »

Made-for-web content performs just as well as repurposed TV content when it comes to ad engagement, according to research from Tremor Video. The study, named "Upfront, NewFront, Nupfront," compared ad metrics for 5 publishers that repurpose TV content on the web with 4 made-for-web content publishers during the first quarter of the year, finding the click-through rates for the repurposed TV content (1.11%) and for the made-for-web content (1.09%) to be evenly matched. Engagement rates were also similar, with made-for-web content (2.72%) slightly ahead of repurposed TV content (2.68%). Read more »

Socialbakers has released its latest "Socially Devoted" figures for Q1, and the results are a mixed bag. On the one hand, the average response rate grew 6% points quarter-over-quarter to 38%, after only improving by 4% points in the preceding 6 months. But on the other hand, that means that significantly fewer than half of questions posted to brands' Twitter profiles were answered. What's more, the average response time increased by 10%, from 6 hours in Q4 2012 to more than 6-and-a-half hours in Q1. Read more »

Americans may not be as keen to share personal and other content online as citizens in other countries, suggests a survey from Ipsos OTX. The study asked respondents to identify how much they share online - including status updates, feelings, photos, videos, and links. Across the 24 countries tracked, an average of 24% said they'd best describe their amount of sharing as either "most things" or "everything." But that figure dropped to just 15% among American respondents. Read more »

The volume of smartphone impressions on the Millennial Media platform is increasing, but not as quickly as impressions from non-phone connected devices, represented primarily by tablets, according to [download page] Millennial Media's latest Mobile Mix report. In Q1, the company reports that non-phone connected devices accounted for 25% of total platform impressions, up from 20% a year earlier. That 5% point gain came entirely at the expense of smartphones, which dropped from 75% to 70% share of impressions. Feature phones, somewhat surprisingly, kept steady at 5%. Read more »

A global shift in marketing budgets from traditional to digital media has been well documented of late, and new survey results from Martini Media suggest that UK marketers are hopping aboard the digital marketing train. 95% of brand advertisers and agencies responding to the survey said they will increase their digital marketing spending this year, with fully 48% of total budgets going to digital media. In particular, 63% will increase their social media investments, 57% their mobile investments, 40% their video investments, and 36% their rich media investments. Read more »