A survey recently published by eMarketer asks 175 chief marketing officers about their use of social media and what kind of ROI Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are delivering.
Facebook was the leader in social media ROI in this survey, despite showing fairly mediocre results:
- 15.4% of the respondents believed Facebook was delivering “significant ROI,” while
- 20.6% said ROI was “average” compared to other social media sites
- Only 8.6% said Facebook was failing to deliver ROI
- 34.9% said they ‘didn’t know’ one way or another, as reported by MediaPost
- 20.6% weren’t using Facebook
MediaPost also summarized the survey results for other social media platforms, including Twitter:
- 11.4% of marketing execs surveyed said Twitter produced “significant ROI”
- 12% said it was “average”
- 13.1% said it failed to deliver ROI
- 40% said they had no idea what Twitter’s ROI was
- 23.4% don’t use Twitter
and LinkedIn:
- 10.9% of marketing execs surveyed said LinkedIn produced “significant ROI”
- 10.3% said it was “average”
- a fairly high 18.3% said it failed to deliver ROI
- 36% “don’t know” LinkedIn’s ROI
While the above results seem to indicate that CMOs aren’t sure how to best measure ROI for these social media sites, the survey respondents largely agreed when asked which metrics are most popular to measure ROI:
- 68% of CMO respondents use site traffic as a metric
- 62.9% use the number of fans/followers
- 62.9% also use number of positive customer mentions
- 65.7% use “conversion,” significantly more than last year’s 32.6% of respondents
- Nearly half (49.7%) agree that revenue is an important metric, up from 29.1% of respondents last year
What metrics is your company using to measure social media ROI?
