Can't Tell if Your Social Media Campaign is Really Working? Here's What You Need to Know

The number of companies integrating social media into their marketing campaigns has been growing steadily over the past decade. Some businesses even rely solely on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to promote their goods and services. However, measuring the impact these campaigns have on their business remains a challenge.

A 2015 CMO survey underlined this difficulty, with only 15 percent of participating marketers being able to quantitatively measure the effectiveness of their social media marketing plans. Meanwhile, a recent MDG Advertising infographic shows that not much has changed with regards to measuring the effectivity of social media marketing and its impact on a company's ROI.

According to the accompanying MDG report, only 20 percent of companies said they were able to determine the success of their social media campaigns while 44 percent could not determine social media's impact on their business. This problem also affects marketing agencies, with 28 percent facing challenges in measuring the effectivity of social media. However, 55 percent of said agencies claim they could somewhat determine the ROI generated by social media while a mere 17 percent could accurately measure it.

Challenges of Measuring Social Media Campaigns

Because social media is a relatively new (and constantly evolving) marketing channel, measuring its true impact of ROI remains a conundrum for many businesses. What's more, a lot of companies remain unsure of social media's place in the big picture.

There are other reasons why measuring social media impact remains complicated.

• Businesses Have Different KPIs: Brands have their own goals, values, and propositions and the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) they want to measure depend on these. However, KPIs can change depending on the direction the company wants to take. This makes it hard to set specific metrics and data points.
• Data is Limited: Each social media platform has its own set of analytics. Some tools engage followers while others show demographic information. It would also require companies to do a lot of mining just to put everything together.
• Qualitative Results are Hard to See: It's easy to see quantitative results such as the numbers of comments, likes, and shares. But the more important question is the kind of action consumers are actually taking -- the qualitative results. For instance, are they buying products or just sharing content?
• Business Impact is Hard to Determine: ROIs are about returns and investments. Even if companies are able to tie their social media campaigns to their KPIs and business goals, most remain confused as to what it means for their bottom line. Companies would have to consider the number of people working on social media accounts and their salaries, social media software, and advertising costs and compare them against KPIs. Read More