ROI
Nov 15, 2012 Staff

Why Measuring Social Media ROI Is Difficult

 

Many marketers are still trying to figure out social media as they go. Justifying the investment of time and money can be especially difficult and confusing. The Hubspot blog has compiled data from several studies to illustrate the challenges of social media. Here are a series of statistics that explain what marketers do measure, and why they struggle with measuring social media success.

  • 84% of B2B marketers use social media in some form
  • 59% of marketers use social media for 6 hours or more per week
  • 83% of marketers say social media is important for their business
  • 53% of marketers don't measure their social media success
  • 52% of marketers say the difficulty of accurately measuring social marketing ROI is their biggest source of frustration
  • 96% measure number of fans and followers
  • 89% measure traffic
  • 84% measure mentions
  • 55% measure share of voice
  • 51% measure sentiment
  • By 2013, campaigns with 4 or more digital channels are expected to outperform single- or dual-channel campaigns by 300%
  • 60% of businesses do not have an integrated social media strategy
  • 50% of businesses see a need to more tightly integrate social and the rest of marketing
  • 35% of businesses see a need to more tightly integrate marketing with the rest of the business
  • 56% of businesses say they struggle to efficiently capture and analyze information from multiple social media channels
  • 54% of marketers say the leading difficulty in measuring social media ROI is the inability to tie social media to actual business results
  • 54% of marketers say it's hard to analyze unstructured social media data
  • 50% of marketers say it's hard to integrate disparate social media data resources

  • A Social Media Examiner survey found that respondents most often saw the key business benefits of social media marketing to be increasing exposure and traffic to their site.
  • An Awareness, Inc. survey found that 78% of respondents listed "better customer engagement" as their top goal.

  • Last-click attribution is the most common measurement model used by marketers to evaluate social media results.
  • Adobe found that using first-click attribution instead of last click resulted in social media ROI data that was nearly twice as high (88%)

  • Marketers expect to spend 19.5% of their budgets on social media in the next 5 years, to almost three times more than the current level.
  • 50% of large organizations blocked social media in 2010; less than 30% will block social media by 2014
  • 75% of a survey of 700 marketers intended to increase social media spending this year


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Published by Staff November 15, 2012