Any illusions that marketers have gotten this whole social media thing down pat will be blown away by the latest findings from Technorati Media’s 2013 Digital Influence Report, which suggests that for everything the media spends across social platforms, the most desired influencers aren’t even being reached.

The new report points out a huge disconnect: only 11% of corporate social media budgets are devoted to advertising on blogs and influencer sites. But fully 86% of the influencers these corporate brands are trying to reach are using blogs as their primary publishing platform.

Brands And Advertisers: It’s All About Facebook

The mismatch is pretty clear in Technorati Media’s report. Typically, just 10% of the total digital marketing budget is devoted to a social ad strategy. Of that slice of the pie, 57% gets tossed at Facebook ad buys, 13% at YouTube and another 13% at Twitter’s sponsored tweets. Just 6% is spent on influencers and 5% on blogs.

It’s not just ad buys, either. When launching social media campaigns, earned media goals are very much stacked towards metrics like Facebook Likes and Fans; Twitter followers and retweets; and traffic on the company’s own website and landing pages.

But the real success of any social campaign is not an all-out blitzkrieg of any given social media channel, but rather the conversion of prospects within a given community to your brand or product. Get someone like Robert Scoble talking up your brand and that could be worth more than a thousand random new followers on your social media accounts. – href="http://readwrite.com/2013/02/05/brand-marketers-totally-miss-social-media-influencers?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29&utm_content=Google+Reader">Brand Marketers Totally Miss Social Media Influencers by Brian Proffitt

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