As marketers survey the social media landscape, Facebook seems an obvious choice for ad dollars. But a new survey says Facebook may be least effective use of your digital marketing budget. Given Facebook’s reach, it sounds dubious. After all, the social networking site boasts about 1.1 billion users worldwide. And Facebook says it has more than a million active advertisers including all of the Ad Age 100. But Facebook ranked last among digital marketers asked how satisfied they were with the business value of using 13 digital channels, including LinkedIn, Twitter and Google Plus. The results are based on a Forrester Research survey of nearly 400 marketers in the US, UK and Canada. And when asked how satisfied they were with the six social networking sites as marketing partners, Facebook once again fared poorly. Just 51% said they were satisfied with Facebook as a partner, placing it behind Google, LinkedIn, and Yahoo. So where is Facebook failing? The company is criticized for failing to innovate “its branded page format or the tools marketers use to manage and measure those pages.” But that doesn’t mean digital marketers should not pull their money out of Facebook. It is still a huge platform to showcase your institution or business. What the research suggests is that marketers should consider their overall plans for digital marketing. Social media marketing is a way to deliver information and pull users in to a deeper experience, through multimedia, personal connections or other dynamic content. It is equally important to deliver targeted digital marketing. This can be achieved through email marketing, SMS text marketing and search engine optimization (SEO). At Sanmita, we believe mixing in all of these platforms to deliver the most effective results. The Forrester survey that up. The most effective digital channels for business value were on-site reviews, searching marketing and email marketing. Among social networking sites, LinkedIn ranked the highest. 
