If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

One of the main reasons folks should use social is, for the most part, easily trackable and you can see quickly your success/failure rates. I’m amazed when asking people who are using social tools how are they doing, they come back to me with some generalized statements like, “I’m doing really well.” If I press them for more details, I come to find out that they really don’t have a plan for measuring what they do and the time they spend at it. Metrics are an important component for the use of social media. Especially measuring for ROI in regards to the amount of time that must be invested. You would think this would be a no brainer. But according to a recent a survey by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education, a whopping 84% of professionals do not measure ROI for social media. It appears that hardly anyone is taking the time to measure the ROI for social.

Some additional insightful statistics from this survey:

• 86% of respondents to the survey of professionals from a variety of industries said they had adopted social technologies.
• 57% said they were using social media tools for marketing.
• More than four in 10 respondents did not even know whether the social tools they were using had ROI measurement capabilities.
• 3 in 10 reported using social media for customer service and support.

Click Here to download a copy of this report.

Here’s another post you might find interesting: How Do You Measure Social Media?

A great resource of social media articles and fresh reports comes from eMarketer. I found the original source of this survey through their eMarketer Daily Newsletter. I highly recommend it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 9:12 am and is filed under Marketing Tips, Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.