Subscribe to this Blog with RSS
What is RSS?
Document Actions
What's your Social ROI?
Has social media delivered on its promises? Can you even tell? According to eMarketer, Social network ad spending will reach $2.5 billion worldwide throughout 2010 and $1.3 billion just in the US, but according to an outside survey only 1 IN 5 marketers even measured their social media ROI in 2009.
Investing in Social Media
In the beginning, everyone knew social media would be beneficial to their business objectives, so they did it without a real way of tracking the impact it was having or by measuring the returns generated from the time and resources being invested.
We thought, “everyone else is doing it, so why shouldn’t we?” And why wouldn’t you? Social Media made big promises. It promised to build a deeper and more meaningful connection between your brand and your consumer and that it would broadcast your brand and personality to the world that would listen. You could reach people you never even knew you wanted to listen.
But has social media delivered? Can you even tell?
According to eMarketer, Social network ad spending will reach $2.5 billion worldwide throughout 2010 and $1.3 billion just in the US, but according to an outside survey only 1 IN 5 marketers even measured their social media ROI in 2009.
Much of the problem starts with the fact that when companies construct their social media plan, it’s often not a plan at all. It’s simply a pre-meditated series of executions to which no strategy is implemented. There’s no true objective other than to throw it out there and see what comes back. Then, as you can see below, marketers try and justify these “random executions” by simply measuring website traffic as a key indicator of social media success.
We’ve found that in order to successfully measure return on social investment, marketers’ need to define their goals and directly connect them to all social media objectives, including the dollar value associated with them. Markets should be systematically monitoring all social interactions with advanced web analytics including the negative feedback.
The most value added to your social media can be found by enabling your network URLs with analytics-encoded strings to successfully measure inbound traffic and campaigns for visitor trends. All of this lies within your Search Marketing and Optimization strategy. Something New Media Gateway is especially qualified to help with. NMG is a Google Analytics Authorized Certified Consultant which, needless to say, pretty much means we know what we’re talking about when it comes to web optimization.
Companies all over are catching on to the importance of measuring social ROI and it’s time you did too. To learn more about what successful social media tactics to employ, measure and optimize, visit our blog “Social Media Tactics that Work,” or contact a New Media Gateway representative.
Merry Measuring!