Social media maintained the highest marketer usage in 2025, with 92% of surveyed marketing professionals reporting use, down from 97% in 2024 and 2023. Social platforms enable broad audience reach and organic content-driven brand building while supplementing performance marketing and acquisition efforts. Global social media ad spend is projected at $276.72 billion in 2025, a 13.6% year-over-year increase. Political factors, including tariffs and a potential U.S. ban on TikTok, create uncertainty that could disrupt projected ad spend growth and marketers' channel choices.
We believe that investing in social these days is the best distribution channel for any brand. It's where you are able to reach the highest number of people, and it puts the emphasis on the content and not the spend. ... While we spend on performance marketing and acquisition, the best way to build a brand is through content that is distributed through social media.
Among all channels considered in Modern Retail's 2025 CMO Strategies series, social media had the highest usage rate for the third year in a row, with 92% of the more than 190 marketer professionals who responded to our Modern Retail+ Research survey saying their company uses social media for marketing. That is down 5 percentage points from the percentage of respondents who said their company used social media for marketing last year and the year before - 97% respectively for 2024 and 2023.
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