Just half of the 96% of marketers that are using social media are attempting to measure social media’s ROI. The challenge is linking social media to business objectives. Read further to get some tips to understand social media marketing efforts better.
Other outcomes than the one mentioned in the first paragraph from BtoB’s study on social media are:
- 47% of B2B marketers are “very involved” or “fully integrated” with social marketing, up from 28% last year, and fully 96% of all marketers are engaging with social media in some fashion.
- Social media now commands 6% of the average b2b marketing budget, a figure that rises to 9% among best-in-class marketing departments.
- Marketers rated social’s performance as a marketing tool at 6.4 on a 10-point scale, where 10 represents complete satisfaction with ROI.
- LinkedIn is the channel most used by b2b marketers. Facebook (75%) and Twitter (74%) are almost as commonly used, with YouTube (59%), blogging (48%), Google+ (32%), customer communities (24%), Pinterest (19%) and LinkedIn’s SlideShare (13%) also represented.
Four tips provided by BtoB to get more our of social media are:
1) Measuring sentiment is as important as measuring impressions or follows.
A customer’s post on a social media site could have multiple meanings, so marketers need to make sure they interpret those messages correctly, said Catherine Van Zuylen, senior leader-product management and marketing at Attensity Group, a social analytics provider based in Palo Alto, Calif.
2) Some of the most important social mentions won’t use your company or product names.
The idea of brand monitoring is not as valid as many believe, said David Rabjohns, CEO of MotiveQuest, a social market research firm.
3) Every tool that provides a metric is not the same.
Frost & Sullivan recently completed a global analysis of the social monitoring market, finding that there are more than 200 different vendors and agencies—and a lot of end-user confusion, said Global Research Director Mukul Krishna.
4) Social media data has an expiration date and limitations.
Twitter data moves very quickly, and it’s difficult to gain access to the entire feed, said Altimeter Group’s Etlinger. Facebook data is often incomplete, she said, because privacy settings may make it difficult for companies to see everything on a page.
Gianluigi ‘s insight:
- The challenge with this is the difference between structured (impressions, follows) and unstructured (sentiment) data. They are both important but the difference in aggregating and analyzing and ultimately combining them is a challenge.
- Great tip. People talk about needs, not of solutions. Understanding the needs through social media has great benefits.
- Tools and technologies come last. Understand your business and audience, goals and strategies, based on those, chose the technology that fits best.
- This is why social media, as any dataset, is one of many datasets and it enriches business intelligence, it’s not a replacement or something like that.
Gianluigi Cuccureddu is co-founder of Damarque, helping you to improve your commercial performance through better engagement with your employees, customers and strategic business partners.
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