Bango surveyed over 200 CEOs across a range of industries as part of its ‘Board to Death’ campaign, which highlights how little digital comms spend can directly link to business results including sales and revenue.  

It found that 60% of CEOs whose businesses have advertised on LinkedIn believe that the social platform’s potential has been exaggerated. A further 77% of CEOs said they would not endorse any future spend on LinkedIn communications.

This resistance to social media comms is not solely focused on LinkedIn, as 52% refuse to endorse increased Facebook spending, while 66% said they would not allocate s budget for Twitter comms. It will come as no surprise to many comms professionals that worked through the pandemic, that 22% of CEOs said social media marketing spend would be the first to face spending reductions in the event of necessary budget cuts.

Anil Malhotra, CMO at Bango and co-author of the research, says, “With 3.78 billion social media users worldwide spending almost 2.5 hours every day scrolling through their preferred social channels, it’s no wonder that marketers want to devote ad spend there. However, tempting though it is, targeting prospective customers through social media isn’t delivering the hard business results that CEOs are looking for.”

Social media was perceived to be limited in terms of its communications reach, with its ability to build good PR and reputation as its greatest strength for 59% of the respondents. Generating sales was highlighted as the digital channel’s greatest weakness, with CEOs most concerned about the monetary return on investment.

“The nature of social media advertising is to target people based on what they follow, like, share and comment on — which is a very poor measure of what people are actually willing to spend money on. Subsequently, countless dollars are wasted on ads which never reach real prospective buyers,” adds Malhotra.