Measuring Social Media Marketing
This article describes measing performance of social media marketing in the form of website traffic, conversions, and customers ( from social sites). A measureing tool that monitors positive, negative or neutral words on the social sites are used to measure the effectiveness of the SMM. The article talks about correalation for positive, negative and neutral measurements. These involve people visiting the website, where they came from , and conversion rates.
This article tells about Adobe social and Google's Analytics. Both are good for measuring social media marketing in their own ways. A big difference between both is that google's is free. A little detail is given on how each works, but not enough to understand the software fully. Still after both these tools have been mention, the same conclusion comes forth as all the other articles; there is still no 100 percent way to measure social media marketing.
Summary-
After reading these articles i have came to a couple conclusions on the subject of measuring the success and ROi of social media marketing. There is actually no way to fully measure social media marketing, but there are tools to help somewhat. Adobe offers its software which is Adobe Social. This software links to the social media sites and gathers data which can be used to help see what people are mentioning your brand. And then there is Googles Analytics. This software is free and doesn't gather data from the social sites, but actually from your own site (traffic).
Since there really is no way to measure social media marketing, many businesses don't go into the trend. How safe is it to invest into a marketing strategy that is difficult to measure results. But i see this as a good thing. With businesses less willingly to step into this marketing, this leaves room for startup companies to move in. If they can gather enough information on how social media sites work ( from person use such as facebook), they will be willing to step in and try it, with out caring of ROI. This can provide a cheap marketing strategy that can benefit small mom and pop businesses. It is well known that big corporations are always thinking ahead and trying not to lose money, and not being able to measure results for boards to see, keeps them away probably. And overall, taking this class has put me in the place to take my step into social media marketing for my startup business and expect not to measure results from it, but to see it, through increase in customers, increase in knowledge of my business, free marketing, and relationships with my customers through posting.