In my quest to find out how to accurately assess the ROI of Social Media campaigns I was not surprised to find that I am not the only one seeking this information.  This is apparent in a 2012 survey conducted by Vizu, a Nielsen company, in which they asked 500 US digital marketing professionals a series of questions to see how they felt about paid social media advertising.

One of the key findings of the survey is that marketing professionals are uncomfortable with the lack of clear link between paid social media spend and benefit to the firms bottom line.  A better calculation of ROI is specifically requested, with 58% of advertisers and 65% of agencies stating they would like more clarity around “how to measure social media ROI” (see Fig 14 and Fig 15 from survey, presented below).  They are also frustrated by the lack of clear link between social media advertising and sales or brand lift.  Current measures of success use things like site hits, Facebook likes, link shares and click-through-rates.  However this is not leaving much confidence with the marketing professionals who are buying up ad space in Social Media.

This finding, while confirming some of the thoughts I have had in many marketing meetings, also leads to another significant question:  if marketers are unclear as to the true benefit of paid social media advertising, then why do they continue to invest heavily in this space?!?  The above mentioned survey actually goes on to show that most marketers are leaning towards increasing spend in social media at the expense of other more classical channels.  Fig 3 below, taken from the survey, shows that 64% of respondents will increase paid social advertising budgets and decrease spend in other channels.

It seems to me that while marketers are not able to comfortably assess the exact benefit to the company’s bottom line, they still see tremendous upside from paid social media advertising and are willing to dive into it while siphoning off funds from other programs.  There is clearly a benefit to advertising in this space, even if it cannot be accurately measured at this point.  Well, either that or marketers are all insane and are simply chasing the latest online fad without truly understanding the benefits!  This will clearlyrequire some more investigation on my part.