The huge debate in the social media marketing niche industry right now is how to measure it. Traditional media experts who are learning about how to use social media to market their products and services want to know one thing: How do we measure the return on investment for social media marketing? Executives and small business owners are always thinking in terms of numbers and the bottom line, so they want to know what they are going to get back if they invest “X” amount of dollars into a social media marketing campaign. This brings about a great question, can social media be measured?
Liana Evans from Search Engine Watch wrote about whether or not social media can be measured. She outlines four “I’s” of measuring social media:
- Involvement: Just how involved is the community you’re engaging with? Are they visiting your site? Are they subscribing to your blog? How many video views do you have? Did they request information from your site or from a member of your team?
- Interactions: How are your efforts working in the way of gauging interactions? Are fan visits to your fan page increasing? Have those fans started conversations? How many replies to a post in a forum have you received? How many comments are your blog posts getting?
- Intimacy: Intimacy demonstrates the level of comfort/love/hate your audience feels with your company brands, products, or services. How much user generated content such as videos, photos, blog review sites or even threads in forums are being generated around your company? How many ratings are you receiving? What is the sentiment of your ratings or product/service comments?
- Influence: Just how much influence are your efforts (or those of other influencers) having on your strategy? How willing are people to recommend you? Did you get a brand awareness lift with your efforts? Are influencers sharing their opinions and are they creating user generated content around your products/services?
There are many factors that go into measuring your return on investment for a social media campaign. Feed subscribers, increase in web traffic, commenting, increased brand recognition, Facebook and Twitter influence, and even interactive customer service with customers are all great ways to measure social media.
Social media marketing is not just about numbers, it’s about building relationships and trust. This is tough to quantify, but the results will show up
The only problem is that many large companies still don’t accept these forms of measurement as real ways to measure ROI for a marketing campaign. They want to link your social media marketing efforts directly to an increase in sales and profit margin. Jason Falls from Social Media Explorer says that traditional media is still more accepted than social media. It’s because the return on investment doesn’t always show up on the income statement, initially. Increased brand recognition, real-time customer service, conversational marketing, and viral word-of-mouth marketing, does translate into higher profit margin, but it the results are often gradual and long-term.
