Social Media – Is it any easier to determine ROI?
January 21st, 2010 | Marleen CallahanSocial networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter are continuing to gain traction and increasing in popularity every day. People use these sites to keep in touch with friends, keep up to date on the latest trends and stay up to date on some of their favorite products, groups, etc. More recently, social networking sites have been instrumental in getting out the message about devastation in Haiti, helping people locate loved ones and also raising funds to help the Haitians.
I, like many other people, am on Facebook and have become a Fan of many companies and groups to keep track of their updates, sales, etc. However, I often wonder, how do they track the success of these campaigns and measure how successful their efforts are? The same can be asked of IT companies that are using these social networking sites to tap into new audiences or audiences that are more engaged. My curiosity propelled me to dig around and see what other marketers are saying about how they determine the ROI of their social media campaigns.
Determining the success isn’t always easy, but it’s important to note that you can’t measure these campaigns the way you’d measure a traditional marketing campaign - either straight lead generation or even direct mail campaigns. These social media campaigns need to be viewed as an extension of traditional marketing campaigns that will help to add more prospects to your sales funnel - just not at the same rate.
It will be interesting to learn what strides we will make in this upcoming year and how social media campaigns will continue to impact organizations and how they will be utilized. There are plenty of predictions out there as to what is in store for us.
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see which of these predictions come true.
