Measuring Social Media And The ROI Debate!
Making money from Social Media ? The jury’s still out in many businesses as they still fail to ask the right questions and look away whilst others jump on board without a strategy or goal defined. Both need to take closer look!
The great social media debate continues! Some embrace whilst others grimace!
Recent studies found that :
- 53% are unsure about their return on Twitter
- 50% are unable to assess the value of LinkedIn or blogs
It is understandable that the apparent lack of a ROI measure may not be attractive to some business owners, not keen to experiment in the current economic climate and sticking to known and proven marketing strategies until their key questions are answered.
Thus, the need to account for any spend and resource allocation means the bottom line is that they want measurable results from social media! However, it‟s not as simple as counting subscribers, followers, fans, conversation volume, reach, or traffic.
In 2010, we‟re entering a new era of online marketing, where the role social media plays is one based on understanding and adapting to new audience involvement models and measuring these new ‘return’ categories.
Engagement:
Length of time spent either in conversation or interacting and identifying a measurable end result.
Participation:
Measuring and evaluating the time spent in social media participation, such as conversations and content exchange.
Involvement:
Locating and identifying where interaction occurred and the potential return at each.
Attention:
Assessing the means to capture attention, hold it, and measure the response.
Trust:
A variant on measuring customer loyalty and the likelihood for referrals. Gauging trust, as earned in social media engagement and the prospect for repeat visits, bookmarking, viral circulation to subscriber own networks, etc.
Establishing a connection between social media activity and a clearly defined goal means asking what do we want to measure before we engage. By doing so, we can answer the questions, “what is it that we want to change, improve, accomplish, provoke, etc?”
Defining a clear strategy can help reach social media goals from sales, subscriptions, referrals and link building to reduction in costs, processes and customer issues, lead generation and conversion.
Tangible ROI insight from 2009 marketing feedback spotlights „customer ratings and reviews‟ as being key to 80% of respondents, who reported that customer stories and suggestions shaped products and services. As a result, brand identity is built up to earn customer trust and loyalty by listening and responding.
According to marketing research, there has been :
- A 400% increase in use of Twitter comments to inform decisions about products and services
- A 59% increase in the use of customer ratings and reviews
- A 24% increase in use of social media for pre-sales Q&A
A clear indication that social media channels have spectacularly increased business opportunities again to engage interactively with potential customer‟s user-generated content in 2010.
You wouldnt believe how long ive been looking for something like this. Went through 10 pages of Yahoo results without finding anything. Very first page on Bing. There you are!…. Really gotta start using that more often