Social Media Investments Must Be Measured | Get Social With Kerry Rego

(Excerpt from Get Social with Kerry Rego, a regular monthly column in the North Bay Business Journal)
One of the biggest digital myths being told today is “Social media isn’t measurable.” Studies across the board show that even though we recognize social media is important to business and reaching our customers, we aren’t measuring the effect it’s having on the bottom line. According to Hubspot, 25 percent of marketers are concerned with proving the return on investment (ROI) when asked about top marketing challenges yet at least 53 percent of companies aren’t even trying to evaluate their efforts.

The excuse that social media actions aren’t measurable is about something else entirely. Most likely they: don’t have the right tools to collect the data; when they get the data, they don’t know what to do with it; can’t or won’t invest in the resources to analyze; or fear of what measuring will reveal about effectiveness. The truth is, we have more data than we ever had with traditional methods of advertising. Nielsen and Arbitron offered us limited information on our television and radio reach and we believed their numerical vagary for decades. As a result, we spent millions on advertising to the masses and rarely questioned the data.

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