A benchmark for social media

Marketing Week has recently published an article – Benchmark your social media – that offers an insight into recent market research and talks about an initiative to benchmark and create a ROI model for social media. The report looks at how brands can put a value on their digital activity. The following extracts are quoted from the article.

 With most marketers expecting to spend more on social media “few claim to know what they really get for their money.”  The four major digital platforms were examined “to see which ones marketers are getting the most success from. Facebook is the most successful with 16% of businesses seeing a return on their investment. This compares with 15% for Twitter and LinkedIn and 9% for YouTube.” Presumably this implies that over 80% cannot identify a return on investment. “Half of the 900 UK marketers questioned by the CIM see potential in social media, saying it will be a significant force in five years’ time. But for the moment, many aren’t seeing results. Nearly a quarter say their activity on Twitter was not at all effective last year, a third say the same for Facebook, 37% for LinkedIn and 44% for YouTube.”

Here are some interesting further snippets from the article.

“if you are achieving above about a 2% engagement ratio, you are generally doing a pretty good job. Past 5% is very good. It’s not difficult to acquire more fans through ad spend if that is what you are after. The challenge is keeping them engaged when you get them there.”

“Social media will make you money if you act upon what your customers are telling you. That is not just as a marketing team, that is the whole business acting on it. It gives you what is on the customer’s mind in real time.”

“About a third of marketers say they are just experimenting with Linkedin and 37% say their marketing efforts through the network were not at all effective. This compares with 33% who say Facebook didn’t get results last year and 44% who weren’t happy with YouTube.”

The general impression is that social media is still pretty much an unknown in terms of demonstrating a clear Return on Investment. Getting Facebook members to “like” a brand is a far step from engaging people with the brand and that is probably even further distance from turning into a buyer. For b-2-b buyers it may be a really big step.