Hello Class
Hopefully everyone has been enjoying getting to explore all of the various social media tools we have covered so far. Today, we will be discussing how we can measure the effectiveness of these tools and hopefully determine if our efforts to utilize them, is actually paying off.
If you find yourself thinking, "oh no, that doesn't sound very fun..." you are not alone. There are many surveys and reports out there that suggest that more than 80% of businesses using these tools do not have precise return on investment (ROI) metrics in place.
I will be covering this in detail today, in the meantime take a look at this article
http://mashable.com/2009/10/27/social-media-roi/
What do you think?
16 comments:
Hi Jeannette,
I understand it's very important to measure return on investment of social media. However, 84% of social media programs don't measure return on investment. I was surprised to see it. They don't care about it.. I know it is difficult to measure return on investment of social media because there are lots of fuzzy matters when we measure it. Nowadays social media and social media marketing is getting bigger to develop any market, so at the same time the investment to conduct social media is getting bigger because they are essentially proportional. If the budget of social media marketing increases more, any firms which utilize social media cannot leave to measure ROI without any other good idea. If their directionality of social media marketing is wrong they have to fix it as soon as possible.
Now some organizations provide their useful measuring tools, so firms should attempt to utilize them to analyze how valuable social media is, where we are now,and where we are heading.
That's it.
Thanks, Jeannette
Have a great weekend.
Ken.
Hi Jeanette,
I found this article interesting because it shows many ways to evaluate a ROI.
However I think that for a company,when using these tools to calculate a ROI, you have to be really cautious and be able to manage expectations, since the studies take times to show a real activity.
Thus even if these way of calculating a ROI are not always really precise, they are actually the best way to calculate a ROI for Social Media sites.
Hi Jeannette,
I think understanding ROI is very important as it is crucial for every company, why shouldn't it be for our investment on social media too? By now we've created accounts on so many social media's because of this class, that by just tipping each one of us' name on Google we can find many web pages related to our own brand image. So I guess that by now we can try measuring our ROI, the only problem as Ken said is that it's difficult to measure it on them, as it's I think, because it's too subjective. But maybe by looking at the number of comments, or friends and relations on each, we can maybe find out our ROI. Shall work on that now!
Hi Jeannette,
ROI, or Return on Investment, does not really work for social media campaigns. There are just too many variables and things that are hard to put a number to.
Planning a campaign involves many departments for brainstorming. Things happen that you did not plan for. Changes are needed on the fly. When you are dealing with the public you must understand social media policies and guidelines.
Managing and tracking social media is time-consuming and can be very expensive without a detailed plan. Once you start, you must plan to stay in it. You need to identify your tools.
I am still surprised to understand how many companies still do not use ROI. ROI is best used when you are trying to justify spending money on a new product.
Hi Jeannette,
I agree with Flora, it's important to evaluate our ROI to make sure our effort are efficient and not useless.
In the same time, I am not sure if the results are really accurate. For example, as Ken noticed in his blog, if you calculate the number of people who follow your blog and compare with the number of comments they leave, you can think that your blog is not interesting enough. But, the reason can be very different - a lot of factors such as " time" can change all your calculations.
Even though, the results are not 100% sure, I think it's essential for companies to know their ROI because they usually invest a lot of money for new campaigns.
I have found that more and more executives are demanding measurable advertising mediums. Digital advertising seems to provide the ability to better track our results and show a true return on investment. This has led me specifically to continue to increase my digital budget while continuing to maintain a diversified media plan - digital, print, and radio. Not only is digital easier to track, it also is affordable and extends your advertising dollars.
Donna G
hi Jeannette,
I do agree with the "oh that doesn't sound fun" part of this article, but, talking seriously, it was very interesting to try to measure the R.O.I because it's also very important for the companies using social media tools, such as in my article, KTLA using Twitter and Facebook to interact with its audience. Companies needs to see if what they are doing online, is successful, or not (and in that case, try to correct it).It's also important to know because the use of social media on a business point of view is not free, and the resources (human, time, technological) should not be wasted !
Anne Sophie
Hi Jeannette,
R.O.I. is one of the basis of all businesses. Nevermind if yours is small or big sized, any entrepreneur is aiming at making more money for less effort. And it happens that increasing your R.O.I. in order to maximize it is a way to increase incomes.
During my past experiences, I worked for a company specialized in increasing R.O.I. for brands that were not leaders in their field. So I already know what is a Return On Investment, but I did not thought it could be relevant to use it for social media.
Nevertheless I believe it is not a very precise tool in this case, because there are still a lot of unknown parameters due to the fact that you mostly get views or comments. Yes, we can count them. But is that what really matters ? I my opinion what's really important is concrete, and it is an offer for a position, it is networking and so on. Not just having "friends" of Facebook or "Followers" of Twitter.
E.
Hi Jeannette,
I think ROI has its advantages and disadvantages.
Firstly,mearsuring ROI can help us Judge the performance of business,and it can be a reference of the strategies of the marketing.
However,business cannot be depended on ROI completely.There are many factors in the market,which will work on your business.You can refer to the ROI,but you cannot ingore other important aspects of market.
Measuring the ROI,we can use lots of ways which was talked on the article you give us.I think all the ways works when you use the
real data and information.
Hello, Dr.G
Since I'm an English major, so I knew nothing about ROI before. After having your class and reading this article, I realize ROI is an important tool to evaluate investment; however, in terms of social media marketing, it is difficult to assess the work of social media. I think to set the baseline and to look for the patterns are two major method to use. I will discuss it in detail in my blog.
Hi Jeannette,
I know it's useful to use ROI to measure return on investment. Because we should know how many people are satisfied with our products,how many not.what's more it's really important to small company.if they want to enlarge their business,they should learn more about their customers' feeling .that do not mean to big company or even international company,it has nothing to do with it.big company have to learn about the different countries,different culture really want ,so that they can make more profit.
It isn't a easy notion. Mabe it's too "new" to explain what is the point. Indeed, I went to so many websites trying to explain what is the ROI but finally I think your link is the better way. I don't find a real definition because it's hard to measure the ROI for Social Media because there are a lot of Social Media so a lot of ways to measure this. It's more easy to measure the ROI in a brand or an organization (sotcks, sales, etc)
Hello Jeannette,
Actually, I didn't know how to measure the Return On Investment in Social medias. Through this article, I learned about the ROI is adoptable for Twitter, Facebook etc.
It is very interesting! If one company utilize this means for marketing, it would make a profit on thier product.
At the same time, they can understand the consumer behavior by calculating the number of clicks and comments.
Thank you for your benefical information ! :)
Hi Jeannette!
It was very interesting while reading the article you gave to us. I was very unfamiliar with social media before taking this class. My interest was only on marketing and I am really amazed how social media can play an essential role even in return on investment. Companies can benefit a lot from calculating clicks, comments and such things as likes and dislikes. These are all valuable sources of marketing and companies can get a huge benefit out of it. I really think ROI is an amazing tool that saves unnecessary costs and raises efficiency!
Thank you for a great information!!=D
The article you gave to me is very interesting. Social media is complicated and fragmented, to measure it is necessary to unify it by some way.
So, ROI is useful to measure our investment on social media.
By using ROI, we will calculate efficiency and remove useless things.
However ROI is not completely. So we should find additional tools.
Hello Jeannette,
I found it interesting that 80% of companies don't think about ROI.
There doing something, but they don't really not what that leads to.
I found that ROI is not that hard to think about, so companies should be aware of that too.
I hope this post won't go into your spam folder.
Yasu
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