Measuring Social Media ROI

Everyone is talking about social media today. Every organization, individual, and non-profit uses social media as an important tool for branding themselves to millions of people who are out there on the internet. But the question is, have we measured the effectiveness of the social media tool? Is the organization or individual simply on social media because the rest of the world is out there or are they on social media because it is profitable.

In an article in PRNews Author Matthew Schwartz suggests three tips to help monetize social channels. Schwartz says companies should align social platforms with financial goals (Schwartz, M., 2014). The three tips Schwartz suggests are to look at the social data more closely because it can help generate new content or shift company focus if needed. The second tip that he suggest is to look at social media costs and analyze the percentage spent for social media work done. The third tip that the author suggests is to ask clients some business information about their social media service and based on their feedback drive the company focus toward it. 

Even the biggest music award that happened on 26^th Jan 2014 hired only one social media person, Lindsay Gabler, to handle the entire show on social media for the Grammy's. Gabler says that she doesn't only focus on the overall strategy but also focuses on how to integrate the partners and sponsorships into messages and content (Hernandez, A. 2014).

An interesting thing that Gabler says is we as social media professionals don’t have to educate our artists to share their thoughts on social media. They already know how to do it and hence as a Social Media person for the Grammys she has to only share that information that artist make available over the internet (Hernandez, A., 2014).

A recent white paper from the Adobe company states that despite social media is used by everyone and has become a thing to be used by every company, it has become difficult to measure driving website traffic, engagement and revenue generation (Souza, J. 2012).

Adobe had conducted a survey of 750-marketing professionals in 2011 and asked them whether they could measure the effectiveness of social media. Eighty-eight-percent of them feel they could accurately measure the effectiveness of campaigns, with 52-percent citing problems with determining a true ROI as their biggest frustration. This only goes to show that social media is still a new phenomenon and it is going to be some time till we actually are able to measure its effectiveness.