How To Measure Returns on Social Media Marketing
By Anna Johnson on May 13th, 2009A survey of online marketing professionals conducted by MarketingSherpa indicates that most regard social media as difficult to measure in terms of return on investment (ROI).
The inability to measure ROI was, in turn, cited as one of the most significant barriers to Internet marketers investing in social media marketing. But are these online marketers measuring the wrong things?
MarketingSherpa observes that online marketers tied to quantitative measures may well find it difficult to measure the true impact of social media marketing. When measured in qualitative terms the returns on social media marketing may actually be quite considerable.
For instance, ‘measures’ such as the quality of conversations around an online marketer’s brand, product or service (are they positive, negative, etc?) can provide an indication of how well their social media marketing is performing.
And although measuring social media marketing in qualitative terms may be more challenging (who is going to evaluate all those conversations and how will they evaluate them?) doing so may actually strengthen the case for employing social media marketing strategies and tactics.
It may also provide the argument in favor of social media marketing initiatives in cases where it’s impossible to derive an accurate quantitative ROI or when the quantitative case just doesn’t stack up.
In other words, even though quantitative ROI measures such as the quantity of brand or product related conversations or click-through rates may not be all that impressive, the quality of conversations and their supposed effect on branding may more than make up for the low quantitative performance.
As a direct response Internet marketer I’m uncomfortable with the idea of relying on qualitative factors over quantitative factors to measure social media marketing performance. Especially when it IS possible to apply quantitative measures to social media marketing performance.
At the same time, however, if you are building a brand, or are otherwise concerned about your reputation, taking into account qualitative measures just makes sense. So it’s probably a case where different Internet marketers may give greater weight to either quantitative or qualitative measures, but should still take both into account.
