The concept of social networks were only beginning to gain traction in the spring of 2007; and now memberships are in the hundreds of millions. Facebook boasts more than 300 million users. There are also social networking and video sharing places like You Tube and Google video, virtual reality sites such as Second Life, Last.fm and iTunes for personal music, Flickr to share photos and micro blogs like Twitter or Pownce. Social Media is growing at a fast pace.
As marketing practitioners, social media marketing includes offsite optimization strategies with the intent of distributed content across multiple social media networks. The tools for this include adding links to services like Digg, Del.icio.us, Readdit and StumbleUpon. This includes writing unique content embedded with your key words and phrases, so when people search online, there’s a better chance of finding your content via the search engines. We also use wire services like MarketWire, or PR Web to distribute optimized press releases, and follow up with posting the same on the free wires like PR-Inside for the linking opportunities.
E-Consultancy, in association with the Online Marketing Summit is has new research showing that most businesses are largely still in the experimental stages of social media. 61 percent say they have experimented with social media, but not done that much.
Now we are seeing that businesses are starting to get to the place where they view social media as crucial, however, everyone has been trying to come up with ways to measure the success of social media campaigns.
A majority of companies have difficulty measuring the return on investment (ROI) from social media. Almost two-thirds of respondents (61%) say their organizations are “poor” (34%) or “very poor” (27%) at measuring ROI. These tools are soon to launch and become part of this new marketing genre.
The increased traffic to a Web site is the business goal that marketers are most likely trying to influence through social media marketing. Three quarters (74%) of companies say they use social media to increase traffic. However, direct traffic to Web site is by far the metric most commonly used to measure the impact of off-site social media, measured by just under two-thirds of company respondents and at (63%), while more brand recognition (64%) is the second most important business objective in terms of impact of social media.
Interestingly, despite the widespread recognition that social media marketing impacts brand reputation and brand visibility, only a quarter of all respondents (25%) surveyed use online brand mentions and brand awareness as a metric for measuring off-site social media success. Just 15% use brand perception as a metric.
About half of companies (56%) say that they try to achieve increased sales through social media activity. But only a quarter of companies (24%) use sales as a metric for measuring social media success.
90 percent of the businesses surveyed said that they expect social media marketing to take up more time internally over the next year. And that is one aspect of this new shift in marketing strategies that we know to be true. It takes an entire team to do it consistantly, and do it right.
