I first wrote this post for the Media Two blog Media Two Point {oh!}. They’ve been awesome enough to let me repost it here.

Social Media Examiner recently published their Social Media Marketing Industry Report for 2011. The report covered value of social media for business, questions marketers have, and trends for this year. Here are a few of the factoids they unearthed.

• 90% of marketers place high value on social media for their business.
• Measurement and integration of social media efforts are top areas where marketers want to better their skills.
• Social media marketing takes a lot of time, with 58% of marketers using social media for 6 or more hours a week.
• Generating more business exposure is the number-one listed advantage of social media marketing.

With all this information, you probably wouldn’t expect that only 28% of businesses outsource some aspect of their social media marketing. But that’s what the report says. Outsourcing social media efforts is underutilized.

Morgan wrote a post a bit ago explaining the advantages of using an agency to handle your social media. I’d like to expand on that with some of the findings from this report.

Social Media Examiner provided a ton of great graphics to show that those who have been doing social media for a while spend more time on it weekly, and get more results–including lead generation, new partnerships, improvements in search engine rankings and increased traffic to their sites.

Then there’s this graphic:

This graphic represents those who are outsourcing parts of their social media marketing, and shows which parts are being outsourced. The overwhelming leader is design and development. That doesn’t really come as a surprise. Those who don’t know design and development know they don’t know design and development. It requires fluency in a completely different language–coding.

Tied for second are content creation and analytics. Monitoring, research, strategy and community management range 4-7% of companies using agency expertise. This is unfortunate in my opinion. Since these aspects don’t require learning a new language, there is often an attitude that one can figure it out through trial and error. How much time is that costing your company? How many leads, new partnerships, search engine rankings and site visits?

As an agency with a social media department, we already know what’s going on in the world of social media. We have to. We have the experience that proves efficient in strategy, analytics and content creation. We don’t have to go through the wasted time of basic trial and error when setting up your social media presence, growing your fan base, developing an engaged audience. Although each audience and client is different, we understand the fundamentals and tactics that enable us to more quickly establish and grow your brand in the social media space so that you can start seeing results.

We understand the ins and outs of measurement. What to measure, how to measure it, and how to tweak efforts based on the results.

Best of all, because we are performing social media marketing for several clients, we gain knowledge that we can use for your brand while working with other clients. That’s more efficiency on your clock.

Are you among the 28% outsourcing social media efforts?