Social media is all the rage in the marketing industry and certainly in tech marketing. But a recent MarketingProfs.com social media study suggests that 70% of responding companies believe they are not adequately measuring their social media efforts.
The study suggests that the biggest hurdle to social-media measurement is, apparently, finding the personnel to do the measurement and analysis: Asked to select the most-applicable measurement obstacle from several listed…
- 30% of the respondents pointed to “dedicated resources.”
- 25% selected “don’t know what to measure.”
- 20% selected “social media measurement isn’t primarily about ROI.”
If your actively participating in social media, your first step should be a plan based on business objectives and criteria for how you will judge the success of these efforts. Technology marketers have been adopting these social media approaches quickly for fear that if they don’t, they will be behind their competitors. In many cases these quick to react scenarios leave little time for properly setting up the approach.
Can you imagine if you were to go to market with an extensive lead generation direct mail or email campaign that has no back end metrics planned, how does a marketing group justify the expense when questioned?
No soap box here, but a word of advice. As you would plan and execute any other media effort, apply the same planning and metrics to social media. The social media option can play an effective role in your marketing mix, if you measure the activity and adjust accordingly.
In corporate terms, social media is a very new concept. Not surprising to me then, corporations are not sophisticated yet in measuring their social media impact. Given the loosely defined universe of “social media” will good tools ever exist to measure the ROI of social media? http://kellyrshort.com
[...] in, an astonishing 54% of companies apparently ban the use of social media at work while as many as 70% do not measure their products based on social media feedback. That’s despite data that suggest 94% of employees believe [...]
I’ve been been recently preparing a good degree of basic research on direct target marketing for a brand-new internet site that we are working on and simply felt like expressing that you web page is quite strong. Thank you for the insightful knowledge you have assembled.