How to Measure Social Media: A Step-By-Step Guide to Developing and Assessing Social Media ROI

9. Breaking Down the Barriers to Social Media Measurement

If measuring social media were easy, everyone would be doing it. Instead, marketers are struggling to measure return on investment (ROI) without any real indication of where the problems lie. Let’s face it—marketers went for decades without being held accountable to core metrics. Executives viewed marketing as a necessary evil, so they let marketers get away with presenting fluff. Then came the recession that started in 2008. Businesses started bleeding capital and losing sales, so executives started asking marketers tough questions: Which programs were actually delivering a return? This put marketers on notice. They needed to show some results or prepare to see their budgets shrink drastically. ...