By Business & Finance 
New research released today by Edelman and the Marketing Institute of Ireland has shown that 70% of Irish marketers plan to increase the percentage of their marketing budget given to social media in 2016.
The research was carried out amongst 100 Irish marketing professionals throughout January and February of 2016. 51% of those surveyed highlighted Facebook as the single most important social platform for their business (up from 36% in 2015) with Linkedin and Twitter at 22% and 21% respectively.
The research was unveiled ahead of DMX Dublin, Ireland’s largest digital marketing conference, which takes place at the Aviva Stadium today.
Twitter remains the platform most likely to see an increase in activity, whilst Snapchat and Instagram see the biggest percentage change from 2015 results.
The Irish marketing community was also very supportive of the new advertising regulations around the use of social media influencers.
Use of social influencers in marketing campaigns is set to increase in 2016, with 52% of survey participants indicating that they would increase their use of prominent bloggers, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and Twitter users.
54% of respondents believe that online influencers can play a credible or very credible role but 25% are worried about the ethics of using online influencers to promote a brand or product.
11% of respondents had experienced a social media crisis in the last year, with 20% feeling unprepared to deal with it.
Despite the increasing amount of online issues, 82% of Irish marketers surveyed had not undertaken any social media crisis simulation in the last year and 40% don’t have any social media guidelines for employees.
The importance of video was again underlined by the fact that 97% of Irish marketing professionals intend to increase its use in their marketing plans in 2016.
When it comes to use of paid ad support of social media, 70% of those surveyed expect to increase their spend in 2016 with Facebook (91% up from 70% in 2015) leading the way in terms of paid social regularly used, followed by Twitter (44% up from 42% in 2015), LinkedIn (28% down from 34% in 2015) and Instagram (16%).
