ROI of Social Media: How to Improve the Return on Your Social Marketing Investment

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SOCIAL MEDIA METRICS TOOLS PROVIDERS

EVALUATING METRICS TOOLS AND HOW TO SURVEY TOOL CAPABILITIES

Any effort to determine ROI needs some tactic or technology to gather the raw data and process it into useful information and statistics of some kind. Social media is not without several developers, tool manufacturers and vendors in this space. The computer-based nature of social media activity makes this process more measurable than its comparable traditional-media cousins and more cost-effective than a human clipping service. At the same time, this abundance of data makes it difficult to select the valuable data from the rest in order to deliver actionable insights: with the volume of data, it's like trying to take a drink from a fire hose.

In this chapter, we provide a framework for analysis of metrics tools, so marketers can make a prudent selection of the tool that will give them the best statistics for their marketing efforts and provide support in an effective ROI strategy. We accept that the tools themselves, the vendors and the manufactures will expand, contract and change as the market continues to unfold, so we will not attempt to publish a complete list here, but we will cover some of the concepts and tactics that fit into our measurement framework.

MONITORING VERSUS METRICS VERSUS INFLUENCE

Many of the tools mentioned are monitoring tools and not necessarily metrics tools. The primary difference between the two is that monitoring tools won't necessarily provide summary ...