Is Social Media ROI an oxymoron?

Since no one can agree on how to measure Social Media, how does anyone talk with confidence about its ROI capability?  Some people are doing it.  But pundits say there is no magic bean. But there are a lot of free tools which give you valuable data. The last time I checked Twitter had: Tweetstats, Twitterfluence, Twitter rank, Twitter reach, Twitter grader… and the list goes on. Soon there will be more SM analytic tools than blogs. How do you choose what to use?

Just as with web analytics, you don’t need to measure everything. But you need to know what your “success metric” is. As Aaron Uhrmacher aptly put it, without some sort of benchmark, it’s impossible to determine your ROI. The bottom for the Analysis Ninjas is to segment your audience and messaging approach, then tie the learning’s back to the site behaviors for actionable results.

Many companies are having success with measuring “conversations” by benchmarking qualitative items like mentions and tonality, while other feedburner freaks focus on quantitative items like RSS feeds and blog traffic.

But don’t try to do it all. Focus on where your audience is and listen; measure what they are saying. Engage with them and be ready to evolve, and you will get loads of actionable data. And if you still don’t think there’s any worth to measuring social media, the go to the Chief Ninja himself, Avinash Kaushik, who’s blog on social media metrics shows he has far too much fun with twitter. Go sign him up as your next speaker and you’ll see why.

To wrap up, i’ve actually had complaints that I never have any pictures in my blogs.  Shame on me. So here’s my view on how you should approach social media in general:

Advertisement