Measuring Social Media Marketing ROI For Your Business

Companies around the world are just now tuning in to the power and benefits of social media as a marketing tool for their businesses.  Social media provides both business and consumers the ability to interact and actively participate in the “community of brands”.   Social media as a marketing channel provides customers the ability to participate in building or even breaking brands, while giving businesses valuable marketing intelligence on their products and services.   Social media sites give consumers the ability to to show other interested consumers how they are using a particular product and benefiting from it, creating powerful word of mouth viral marketing.   

Effective social media marketing provides a mechanism for companies to spread the word about their products and services quickly and creatively and empowers consumers to respond quickly about those products and services, creating one of the most revolutionary customer feedback loops for consumers and brands alike.

Forums, online communities, blogs, live casts, social bookmarking sites, user review sites, multimedia sharing, micro blogging, and social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. With all the new technology out there, it is vital for businesses to track the ROI of all of their marketing activities, including their brand reputations’.  Companies are scrambling to ensure that their expenditures in social media can be justified as sound investments that will, in fact, add to the company’s bottom line in a definitive way.   While measuring the ROI of social media marketing is crucial, it has proven to be somewhat tricky as the total measured benefit of the channel goes far beyond the more traditional measurements of ROI in marketing and media.

As the medium has grown, tools to track its effectiveness for business have started to emerge.   Most companies are seeing beyond the “shiny new toy effect” of social media and are looking for ways to demonstrate to their shareholders that these activities are worthwhile, to manage their brand reputations and build market share worldwide.

Here is a  list of some of the applications that are available for businesses to measure and manage their social media activities and brand reputations online today:

• Collective Intellect – collects real time market information, providing insight into consumer opinions for marketing professionals.
• Buzz Logic – helps businesses see what social media sites are generating high interest or buzz, so it can advertise there.
• Buddy Media Platform – a simple way for both companies and advertising agencies to manage and track their social media efforts.
• Alterian Social Media – provides software for public relations and marketing companies to measure, track and monitor businesses rate of success in social media.
• Radian 6 – currently the market leader in social media monitoring, they offer a platform to “listen, measure, and engage with customers across the entire social web”.
• Brands Eye – online reputation monitoring tool.

Social media is here to stay.  It allows consumers to play an active role in the marketplace providing business targeted feedback for their products.  It is important for businesses to track this feedback to make sure it is meeting the needs of the customer.  As the demand for social media grows, business will need to find tools to help monitor them as they grow with this exciting new technology.