Social Media ROI: Myths, Truths, Measurement

Since we are embarking into the social media scene at work, I have been researching on how we measure social media. Question: Is the way you calculate social media ROI the right method? And are you meeting your business objectives and goals? If you answered YES to these questions, YAY!!!

But even that, are you 100% sure you are doing it the right way?

Like my boss, many are still skeptical about marketing via social media and some claim its not really measurable as it's difficult to get the benchmarks and without the metrics it seems diffiult to claim that a strategy really worked. I feel that way, but it might be because I don't have all the numbers to plug in yet.

But for online marketers like me, its a high priority because they:

• need to improve effectiveness
• need to improve integration with other marketing
• feel pressure to report quantified outcomes

But before we discuss the best way to measure our social media marketing, we need to set business metrics which are basically goals and KPIs of our marketing strategies. If its just because "our agency advised us to do it" or "our competitor is doing it too" then, please think about the reasons more deeply.

Examples of some typical social media business goals:

• Gather competitive intelligence
• Engage with customers and prospects online
• Maximise reach of content and messaging in social channels
• Support existing sales and marketing campaigns
• Support recruiting and retention efforts
• Build a customer community to provide support and advocacy

Now to get to ROI, these metrics have to be turned into business benefits -a combination of tracked data and outcome  data, which are not directly connected to social media. e.g. total sales, number of test drive requests, registrations, etc.

I think its quite important to consistently measure ROI of a lot of things..as long as it concerns the growth of our company, in the end we want to knoe whether our investment will pay off or not. Of course its true to listen more to the customers and start engaging with them (by talking with them but first listening  to them). I think this is an investment as well..

Social Media Marketing: We need to measure it! (or do we not?)

Social Media Marketing has received centre stage in today's marketer's planning plateau. E.g. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, etc. 

Marketers are curious about this "new" channel to market especially given that many studies depict a sense of postivisim in it. However, the reality is social marketing is something of a black box, marketers inject programs into the black box and cross their fingers at the output.

Perhaps the standard quantitative notions of approach to analysing data (bounce rate, CTR, regression, path analysis, etc) may be cast aside for qualitative methods? Afterall social being social requires the need for verbal and face checks, no? or perhaps we should just get companies to state their objectives and we just track certain metrics. Do we really need to measure it? I think that is the question. Or should we just let social media play its role and just cross our fingers and hopefully the spread of its positive will correlate positively with profitability and hope that we can control the spread if its negative.

Well what are your thoughts? There are many different ways to see how many people see what you create, but is there a way to get a true sense of how well your Social Media Marketing is doing? For all the measurement metrics and stat softwares out there the only number we should be looking at when determining the success of our Social Media campaigns is the same thing we look at any campaign. Its the only thing we judge each of our social media campaigns on.

I came up with pros and cons of some of the top measurment methods:

1. Number of followers and Likes -Does it really mean anything? Obviously its great to have an audience, but usually 35% of followers are competitiors, people you know in the industry, etc who are really not there interested in your product/services. So who are you really helping? Bottom line, an audience is great and any form of media is valuable. Its also far less expensive than an ad in the newspaper or TV .
2. Engagement. Some will say that the number of follwers are useless if you don't have a high engagement score. I guess the real problem is that the majority of Social Media users don't really interact to brands on those sites. They sit and watch.  
3. Revenue - Let's be honest. Companies/Brands get into Social Media to get new clients, increase revenue and not really into making new friends. Social Media marketing is just a piece to the great Marketing pie and cannot sustain a business on its own. Like all of us know, u require awareness to purchase and hopefully turn that purchaser into an evangelist for your brand.  

By looking at the question re. "measuring" if by measuring it means counting friends and followers it really doesn't add much so to me that sort of measurement can be skipped.