Comments on: Are You Measuring Your Social Media ROI?

By: Ian Harte

Ian Harte — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 13:56:30 +0000

Very good post! I am very interested in what you have wrote about, I am going to have a more in depth read over the weekend, bust now haha!

By: cory huff

cory huff — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 15:06:02 +0000

Good times. Lisa, thanks for this. Your list made me stop and do a mental check. I’m measuring all of those things, but it made me want to know for sure that I’m measuring the right things.

Thanks a lot!

By: David Booth

David Booth — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 03:05:20 +0000

Social media is still in that phase where everyone knows by now that they should be doing it, but few know why and fewer are able to figure out what it’s adding to their bottom line – love to see advocates for the latter!

This was a larger site, but below is a post from the Google Analytics blog about social media tracking of Lollapalooza’s music festival this year. Even if you’ve got a small site, integrating analytics and social media through event tracking, virtual pageviews and campaign tagging can start to paint a very good picture of what your social media campaigns are doing for you with respect to your own unique goals and KPI’s.

analytics.blogspot.com/2009/05/lollapalooza-tracks-social-media.html

Full disclosure – I was the author of this post, but hope it helps get people thinking about tracking return on social media investment.

Thanks for posting about this!

By: Mack Collier

Mack Collier — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 20:03:22 +0000

Hey Lisa, thanks for the mention! I think small businesses also jump into social media without a pre-set strategy and plan, but it can often be because they feel they ‘have to try something’. Tim Jackson at Masi is a great example of this. He was the entire marketing department for his brand, and was looking for a creative way to get the word out about his brand. So he embraced connecting to his vendors and customers via social media, and he’s had big results, I think sales of the brand are up like 400% since he started using social media.

But the main point I was trying to make wasn’t that companies should just try social media for the hell of it. I was trying to stress that companies SHOULD measure and track what they are doing and JUSTIFY why they are using social media. They have to create BUSINESS VALUE from their efforts. Ideally, that value will directly impact the company’s bottom line, but if that’s not traceable, then track the benefits back to something that DOES impact the bottom line.

BTW I wouldn’t say that the big brands I mentioned just started using social media because they had buckets of money. I think they started because the guys at the top understood the VALUE that would be created. I asked Richard Binhammer of Dell once how they sold Michael Dell on using Social Media. He said ‘We didn’t, he told US to do it!’ Dell did that because he understood that his customers were using social media, so he saw the VALUE in using those tools to connect with his customers.

Great thoughts here, I think we agree on the main points! ;)

By: Verabera

Verabera — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 19:53:19 +0000

Another good one :) Thanks again!

About brand awareness and brand sentiment. Any recommendations / studies / articles about how to measure different brand related KPIs? Thanks in advance.

By: Lars Tong Strömberg

Lars Tong Strömberg — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 19:30:33 +0000

You confuse ROI – Return on investment, with KPIs – Key Performance Indicators.

By: jaamit

jaamit — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:48:17 +0000

absolutely spot on Lisa. ROI doesnt have to be about immediate sales or leads, it stands for “return” ie what am I actually getting for all this money I’m spending on this social media claptrap?

I was having this discussion with someone the other day who was basically arguing “oh you dont need to worry about ROI with social media, you cant measure the benefit, that will just limit you.” I respectfully disagreed, but not nearly as eloquently as you have hear.

it’s nuts how these moneybags companies can just throw cash at a consultant, receive some buzzwords and platitudes and be happy with that. To be honest I feel there’s a similar thing in SEO too – far too few SEOs actually measure ROI and far too few of the big brands esp are happy to spend without knowing what it’s doing for them. it’s those of us who deal with smaller businesses who are pushed to actually work hard and prove a good return on our clients’ investment.