An online quipster poised the question: “How do you measure the return on investment (ROI) of social media marketing?” He then answered his own question with “You don’t.”
Fortunately, that’s not exactly true.
As businesses scramble to set up Facebook, Twitter and MySpace pages, analysts are scrambling to discover how impactful their company’s SMM has been. For some, the answer is “we can’t measure this,” but others believe there are statistics that reflect their SMM’s effect.
As Aaron Uhrmacher, the guru of social media, recently said in an article on Mashable, “Social media measurement is one of those topics about which everyone has an opinion, but nobody agrees on the solution.” His suggestion – - as a beginning point – - is to simply decide on what to measure.
What’s Your Social Media Marketing Goal?
If your goal is to increase your reputation–get potential clients talking about you in a positive manner – - then get out onto the social media sites and monitor what’s being said about you.
In a brief run-through searching Twitter, I found some very mean-spirited comments about a specific entrepreneur’s e-mail campaign. At another site, a customer was complaining that it took days for a company’s customer service department to contact her . . . leading her to wonder if she was dealing with a real company or a scammer.
In both instances, a social media point of contact–shall we call it a czar?! - could have reached out to customers via direct message or e-mail and turned a damaging situation into a win-win. After all, social media is about “social” – - building relationships.
If your goal with your SMM is to measure traffic, then setting up a solid analytics program that tracks incoming links will tell you if your visitors are coming from Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Although Google Analyltics are excellent (and free), we also suggest Xinu, a free site that tells how your website is doing in terms of search engines, search engine optimization, social bookmarking, RSS, and other social indicators.
Measuring ROI on social media marketing isn’t a precise science; but what we know for sure is that businesses and entrepreneurs need to have a success metric in mind before jumping into the game.
We have used Social Media Marketting in the past. Because the product we offer is so specific to a certain market we have found Social Media is more aimed at the general market. Our best promotion involved a competition and the great thing was a lot more visitors were involved. Even though it did not create a direct affect, it did create some brand awareness for us.
Social media is more for building brand loyalty and awareness not directly for sales.
I have found that traffic from social media sites in general don’t lead to high quality visitors.
very very nice and comfortable post, thanks for sharing……
You said it Nancy: one must define what her GOAL is with using social media.
I think that’s where a good bit of confusion sets in and people assume there isn’t any way to measure ROI with using social media. You have to know where you’re at and where you want to be to measure progress. That applies to any aspect of life.
Here’s an article that gives 35 examples of possible metrics to focus on for the elusive “engagement” factor: http://econsultancy.com/blog/4887-35-social-media-kpis-to-help-measure-engagement
Thanks for broaching the elephant in the room, Nancy
I think that as we keep talking about metrics, we’ll find more obvious ways of measuring success with SMM.
If we agree that determining the ROI of social media is a necessary evil to making intelligent marketing decisions, then how do we measure it? Therein lies the problem.
Well the new insights page available with facebook should help a bit