Measuring Social Media Success in 2012
And three goals for increasing social measurement this year.
And three goals for increasing social measurement this year.
Let’s start this month’s column with four statements:
This is what marketers are still saying about measuring social media and its effectiveness to contribute to the bottom line of any organization. With so many questions and so much data to look at, marketers are confused, and worried that their efforts, as robust as they are, actually are not very effective at all. Only 13 percent of marketers say they are “very effective” at measuring results.
That’s not very good.
Nor is the fact that marketers are still taking the easy way out and counting fans, whether they are friends, followers, or “likes.” They are ignoring the more concentrated metrics such as engagements (share, forward, retweet, posting of brand content, etc.). And even more so, you see the other metrics such as visits or time spent with branded content, or even incremental sales attributable to social media, not being accounted for by most marketers.
We all know measuring ROI is a challenge; if it was easy, everyone would do it. But, there are ways to combat the issue; however, marketers still plague themselves with such little ammo going into the effort, they don’t invest properly. In The State of Social Report 2011 by LBI and bigmouthmedia, 35 percent of marketers said they use a free tool and 39 percent of the group surveyed said they didn’t use any at all. That’s 74 percent of marketers doing very little to quantify efforts in the first place.
Three Goals for Increasing Social Measurement in 2012