Whitepaper from the leading web metrics agency Coremetrics on social media analytics/metrics. In summary:
- Social Media Marketing: A growing share of a growing market (share of interactive marketing spend to increase from 2.7% (2009) to 5.6% by 2014 (overall share of interactive marketing as % of total ad spend to rise from 12% to 21% (Forrester)) (current share Mobile 1.5%, Social Media 2.8%, Email Marketing 4.9%, Display 30.6%, Search 60.2% (US))
- But top 5 barriers to Social Media Marketing effectiveness
- Lack of clear marketing objectives
- Singular focus on conversions [CPA (cost per action) PPA (pay per action)] to the exclusions of all other objectives (e.g. awareness, reputation)
- Lack of robust website analytics
- Lack of any social media analytics
- Multiple vendor reporting and overhead (consolidating data from multiple vendors)
- The big issue for social media marketing? Establishing ROI – is it CFO friendly? What is the return on marketing dollars spent in social media? To answer this, we need reliable social media “analytics” (that’s where Coremetrics comes in ;-) – or metrics in plain English to measure not only the overall return on investment in social media, but the comparative return (transactions, traffic or softer marketing objectives (awareness, reputation) in investment in different social media tools (advertising on social networking platforms, video sharing sites or blogs, enabling [syndicated] user reviews etc)
Interestingly, for social commerce, Coremetrics has teamed up with Bazaarvoice to offer an analytics solution.
