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How BtoB and Consumer Marketing companies measure Social Media strategies – and why this new blog post matters to you today

By: Raquel Hirsch
Date: December 6th, 2009

Both business-to-consumer (BtoC) and business-to-business (BtoB) companies are rapidly adopting social media, according to eMarketer, “unable to ignore a major destination of Internet users” (and if you are reading this, you knew that already)

Social media, as we know it today, is only a few years old – at best (Mark Zuckerberg invented Facemash on October 28, 2003; and work on “the Twitter project” started on March 21, 2006).

Yet, remarkably (!), the world today is filled with so-called social media experts (Google search generates 289,000 results for this term) and yet very few (surprise-surprise) are measuring much or developing metrics that support the execution of a social media strategy based on ROI.

So, what is really happening here? How are BtoB and BtoC companies managing their social media strategies? How are they measuring ROI?

Business.com recently published its “2009 Social Media Benchmarking Study” – and we take note because of the depth of their research based on insights into business social media usage provided by nearly 3,000 North American business professionals.

According to them, the two types of firms, BtoB and BtoC, have different social site usage patterns for business purposes – with BtoB firms demonstrating marketing leadership.

Their study found that:

• B2B companies already using social media were much more active in the space than their B2C counterparts, especially when it came to microblogging, participating in discussions on third-party sites, blogging and monitoring company mentions on various social media. Plus, they were managing profiles across more social sites and were significantly more likely to be present on Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.

• B2Cs were ahead in a few areas: social media advertising, user ratings and reviews, and online communities for customers and prospects, and won the day at Facebook and MySpace.

• B2B social media users were more active in measuring most social success metrics as well and more B2Bs were looking at Web traffic, brand awareness, and prospect lead quality and volume.

• Six in 10 B2B respondents used Twitter search to monitor mentions of their company or brand, compared with just 35% of B2Cs. The difference in usage of Google Alerts was slightly smaller, at 59% of B2Bs versus 40% of B2Cs. Consumer-oriented firms were most likely to keep tabs on mentions via Google search, at 61%, just edging out B2B companies, 60% of which googled themselves for this purpose.

How companies are measuring Social Media Success:

The average company in this study used four different success metrics:

1. The amount of web site traffic generated — the most popular way
2. Engagement – with prospects and customers
3. Brand impact – awareness and reputation
4. Leads – both quantity and quality

• Companies measuring leads are more likely to also measure the revenue impact of social media initiatives than companies which don’t focus on leads.

• Also, companies judging the success of their social media initiatives on engagement with prospects and/or customers are more likely to also measure brand impact than they are revenue or leads.

The study also asked respondents to tell how well they can see the impact of company social media initiatives on the success metrics they use today:

• 65% of respondents using web site traffic as a social media success metric report that the data they need is either part of standard reports today or is easily accessed when needed

• At the other end, 14% reporting that they don’t have the data (i.e., either they know they cannot measure the impact of social media initiatives on web site traffic at all or they have no idea whether or not the data is available)

• The brand metrics – awareness and reputation – fall to the bottom of the scale with almost equal percentages of respondents indicating that they can easily see the impact of social media initiatives on these metric or can’t measure the impact at all.

So, it looks like marketers are at least trying to measure social media success – but it isn’t clear this is a cross-industry trend.

“Looking at these results,” writes study author Ben Hanna, Ph.D. VP, Marketing R.H. Donnelley Interactive, “one can’t help but ask the obvious questions – how can a company claim to judge social media on a particular success metric like brand awareness or customer engagement with no ability to actually measure that metric? Do companies think they should measure the impact of social media on brand and engagement metrics but never get around to doing so? Or is this result more a function so many companies with little experience in social media participating in this study and we should expect that the ability to measure brand impact and engagement improves with experience?”

This study should provide you with context to decide how proactive you are in measuring social media success (you can access the complete study here).

The point is, are you in fact measuring social media success? Proactive companies are.

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18759 Responses2009-12-06+23%3A43%3A31Raquel+Hirsch to “How BtoB and Consumer Marketing companies measure Social Media strategies – and why this new blog post matters to you today”

Oli Gardner Says:
December 7th, 2009 at 3:49 am
Great post, Racquel – lots of juice data in there.

Measuring the impact of social media is appearing as one of the biggest challenges to modern company operations. Just looking at the prevalence of blog posts dicussing it’s importance and the need for it sets the stage.

I don’t think anyone (that I’ve read about) has really nailed a solid methodology for simple measurement of social media.

Taking one at a time even, if it were possible to track Twitter metrics over time in a graphical way (a la Google Analytics) would be huge.

This would need to incorporate tracking bugs to facilitate the connection between social media platforms and your end conversion goals.

Harder still are he brand oriented metrics.

I see the Karma tab on the Feedly service and I see some soft improvements and hope that we’re getting there, but social measurement is surely the next KILLER APP.

Oli
Oli Gardner Says:
December 7th, 2009 at 3:50 am
Excuse my misspelling of your name.
Raquel Hirsch Says:
December 7th, 2009 at 7:26 am
Thanks for the insights, Oli.

I like your approach of taking one social media at a time (the one companies spend most time on?) and getting a good handle on it first. For sure social measurement is going to be the next killer app – but it will have to start with an agreement of what you *need* to measure, which in turn is predicated on what are the key drivers of company success (traffic? engagement? leads? etc).

(Re the spelling of my name, not to worry, I have been called worse
Gifford Morley-Fletcher Says:
December 7th, 2009 at 8:02 am
Great post Raquel, and very relevant as more and more agencies encourage their clients to dip their toes in the world of Social Media Marketing. Any agency worth their while will always define a way to measure the success of any project they work on, but you’re quite right – there’s no standard form of measurement for Social Media.

At the same time, maybe this isn’t surprising. One of my bugbears at the moment is people who always insist that the ‘R’ in ROI is financial. I work in B2B marketing, and when we work with Social Media, we’re generally dealing with the top of the funnel, raising awareness of our clients’ brands and products, and encouraging people to engage with them.

It’s often impossible to measure performance in terms of leads, sales or anything financial in the short term, and we therefore only set targets in terms of what we are able to measure. For that reason, the ROI we measure differs from client to client, although it will pretty much come from the list you mention above: traffic, engagement, branding (in terms of mentions), and occasionally leads.

Still, you’d be mad not to measure at all – my clients certainly wouldn’t let me get away with that!
Raquel Hirsch Says:
December 7th, 2009 at 8:16 am
I love your quote “Any agency worth their while will always define a way to measure the success of any project they work on”!

The fearless marketing players in these turbulent times acknowledge that marketing is about *business* and that determining the benefit of what we do needs to be an objective – even if the tools are rough at the moment. I am sure your clients value that in what you bring, Gifford.
Nicholas Wind Says:
December 7th, 2009 at 10:47 am
Good article Raquel.
I’ve just started to follow you folks.
I follow smarter people with smarter content and you folks provide great info.
Thanks
Social Steve Says:
December 7th, 2009 at 10:59 am
Raquel -

Nice coverage. Social media is much like other marketing endeavors with regards to measurement. That is many companies do not know how to appropriately measure and/or ignore this important step. Measurement is imperative – you want to maximize your efforts so you have to know what results you are producing. Also, it is required for budget justification – at least where I have worked over the years.

The one thing I always recommend is NOT to tie social media (or marketing) measurement to sales. This always leads to endless debate. The fact is that “Sales” sells and marketing creates awareness and generates qualified leads. Lets not mix these two up.

So what should be measured? I make some recommendations in an article I authored, “Measuring the Value of Social Media” at http://bit.ly/hodQp. I hope you find this useful.

Best,
Social Steve

PS Given the name of your blog, I thought you might find this interesting as well – “Social Media Conversion and the Social Media Marketing Funnel” at http://bit.ly/dsPrq.
Uri Says:
December 7th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Thank you for this post. We just had a discussion about ROI analysis of AdWords campaigns in our company (Optify, Inc.), and this post came right on time. To responde to Oli Gardner request for tracking Twitter application, Optify offers a Twitter for Business application that does just that. You can check it out on our website – http://www.optify.net, and sign up for the free beta to try the product.
We are working now on adding more and more measurement metrics to our application to allow better analytics of the effect of social media on your profitability.
Thank you again for this post and the link to the report.
Measuring Social Media Strategies « Suzanne LaChapelle’s Weblog Says:
December 10th, 2009 at 4:03 am
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