Commentary

Social Media ROI Remains a High Priority for Marketers

  • by , Staff Writer, December 7, 2011

Coming to grips with the return-on-investment from social media marketing is a high priority for marketers, according to a survey of 362 marketing executives by Lenskold Group -- but that doesn’t mean they’re confident in their ability to do so.

Overall 77% of marketers are using social media to promote their business, a proportion that holds true across businesses large and small, Lenskold found. Within this group, 55% (42% of the total sample) said they considered measurement of social media efforts to be a high priority. The most popular reason, cited by 65% of marketers who said it’s a high priority (or 27.5% of the total sample) was the need to improve effectiveness, while 59% (25% of the total sample) said they “need to improve integration with other marketing.”

Among the 45% who said measuring social media is not a high priority, 39% (17.6% of the total sample) said it’s because they are “still testing and experimenting on a small scale.” Meanwhile 18% said it’s because their social media budget is too low to warrant measurement, 9% said it’s because management doesn’t ask for measurement, and 8% said because they don’t think the right tools for measurement exist.

However, even among those who make it a high priority, confidence in ability to measure social media effectively is fairly low: just 19% of respondents who say it’s a high priority said they felt they had a strong ability to measure ROI, and 18% said they can measure incremental sales from social media marketing. That compares to 43% who said they feel confident in their ability to measure engagement or participation, and 32% who said they can measure prospects or leads generated.

1 comment about "Social Media ROI Remains a High Priority for Marketers".
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  1. Dina James from Interactive One, December 8, 2011 at 4:31 p.m.

    The biggest advantage that you have with online ads is that you have the capability to measure ROI. In less than perfect economic times, I think this is pretty important benefit because a lot of businesses view advertising as a cost center rather than a profit maker. I think social media in particular is heating up rapidly in importance because businesses recognize that the emotional advantages of social media (all of your friends are in that environment, and they see what you endorse and talk about) outweigh the potential negatives by a large margin. Additionally, I see this market's growth ramping up even faster because of how many new companies I see using the types of companies listed at http://www.buyfacebookfansreviews.com that do nothing other than help businesses get more Facebook fans. I think that the people cited in these stats that aren't measuring their ROI because they've just started getting involved with social media are going to find that they'll be forced to do so rather quickly because competition on Facebook and other social sites for ad space continues to heat up. We've seen this with Google and it will happen with every new platform.

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About the Author

Erik Sass is editor of Publishers Daily. You can reach Erik at eriksass@gmail.com.