Internet Marketing Pakistan

Jehan Ara (President PASHA) wrote a blog post inquiring the ROI and Effectiveness of Social Media Marketing.

Jehan asks:

“With individuals, corporations and governments beginning to use Social Media for marketing their products and services, the question that is being asked is “What is the ROI and effectiveness of marketing using Social Media?”

I have always felt that Social Media Strategists like myself need to educate executives on this issue and re-define ROI for Social Media Marketing itself.

Here is my response the Jehan’s inquiry:

This is a big question right now and as Carlos said it is probably work in progress.

In my experience, the value of Social Media Marketing is in the goal that it is assigned. If the goal is to make more money, I am sorry, any effort to measure the effects of SMM will fail. But if the goal is “participating in the conversation”, then you have ways to measure the effect of SMM. Metrics like number of comments, percentage of positive/negative comments, number of feature ideas crowd sourced via SMM, ROI of these new feature ideas etc. can be used to judge the quality of SMM.

Share of voice, behavior shift, and expanding reach are also ways to monitor ROI of Social Media Marketing. But, in the strict mode of business results, there is still no answer and I contend that there is none to be found. Social Media Strategists like myself have an obligation to educate C-Level executives to think about Social Media Marketing in a different way than traditional visits and clicks view that web analytics tools are providing on their desktops.

What is your experience in developing ROI for Social Media Marketing Strategies?