Despite widespread adoption of social media marketing and belief in its utility, many marketers have not adopted or developed metrics to assess social’s bottom-line value to their organization. According to a study from PulsePoint, 27 percent of companies are relying on the intuition of their executives and another 28 percent don’t measure the impact of social media marketing at all.
Like other forms of internet marketing, it can be difficult at times to monitor social media contribution to a company. However, using such intangible metrics, such as intuition, can lead to imbalance and inaccurate understandings of social media marketing’s true ability to add value to a business. There’s a long-standing demand for social metrics, with reports from last year revealing that 80 percent of businesses felt they couldn’t effectively gauge social ROI.
Leading platforms offer some tools, like Facebook Insights and Twitter Web Analytics that provide click insights but they don’t currently offer the type of engagement metrics that companies can place an exact dollar on. Marketers want to move toward viewing social as a tool likely to help guide prospects through conversion funnels to develop a picture of the economic value of their campaigns.
Brafton recently reported that Google has rolled out Social Analytics Reports to help companies determine the value social efforts have on their conversions. As a prospect converts, the various channel he or she interacted with in recent days and weeks will be credited with a portion of the conversion and a “social assisted conversion” tool monitors the influence of exposure to social content.
