US and the UK has taken on digital working environment.

A month ago we asked a series of questions to our digital communities to find out everything about them: from their work, their salary to their social media budgets, their social media metrics and so on.

We are delighted that so many of you took time out of your busy schedules to participate in and share our survey!

Since we had responses from all around the globe, we were able to identify some very interesting results which we are going to present in a series of three articles during the next weeks. Let’s get started!

 

Budgets

 

Budget-wise, it seems that the UK is more open to new developments and trends than the US: while nearly 2 in 3 US participants claim to have no budget for social media at all, only 2 in 5 do so for the UK. However, the striking fact here is that among US respondents, nearly 50% said they are not expecting any increase in the very same budget, while only 18% of UK participants have to deal with this.

How come that social media seems to have a much lower budget focus in the US than in the UK? Is it because they do not see the additional value in it? Or maybe because they have other ways of utilizing and leveraging social media without spending any money it?

In any case, budget that IS allocated in the future will massively go to social activities, while traditional media like TV, print, and radio are literally absent in the participants’ work environments.

Where online business happens

When asking for the most important platforms, you might expect Facebook and Twitter to top the list, probably followed by Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn. However, the survey unveils some surprising discrepancies.

While Twitter ranks #1 in the US with a weighted average of 3.90/5, followed by Facebook with a score of 3.78/5, results vary in the UK. Twitter is, indeed, ranked #1 here too, but Facebook’s importance was only valued a weighted average of 3.37/5, which pushes the network down to #3 out of 8 possible answers. In the UK, LinkedIn comes right after Twitter, followed by Google+ and YouTube. On the contrary, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google+ rank #3 to #5 in the US.

In addition, the three image-based social media networks that are Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr are ranked at the end of the importance scale among the drafted options.

 

Tools’ impact on daily routines

 

One common answer to what is causing daily headaches during work is “staying on top of all the versatile tasks without freaking out”. Due to the number of platforms, different technical requirements etc. – managing day to day activities manually has become cumbersome.

It is interesting to see how US-based and UK-based participants, respectively, differ in the use of modern tools:

When looking at the results, one of the most interesting findings is that digital professionals in the UK seem to get so much more inspiration for their content strategies from their day to day tool usage than their American counterparts.

Ultimate challenges

Despite the fact that modern tools can help with daily tasks like posting content, there are some major other challenges, with which Social Media and Community Managers as well as Marketers have to cope.

We have seen earlier that budgets in the US seem comparably low, and also that this is probably not going to change significantly in the short term. Another problem that surfaced in our findings is that multi-tasking is becoming more and more problematic and worrisome for our survey participants.

As shown, finding new audiences to bring brand or product on their radars is what the majority of all participants are struggling with. Also, percentages were equally distributed and the only differences were found in “being asked for one’s ROI” and “staying on top without freaking out.” Furthermore marketing professionals in the UK seem to feel more respected in their work than their American counterparts.

We hope you enjoyed reading and would be happy if you came back for our next post about “traditional Marketing and Communications experts vs. a new squad of Social Media and Community Managers”!

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