Brands Prove Unsuccessful In Measuring Social

With social channels now widely seen as a conduit for higher customer engagement and sentiment, brands are now increasingly keen on integrating social media into their marketing and businesses strategies. However, they still find it difficult to develop an effective approach to evaluating the effects, according to a recent study.

Econsultancy’s sixth Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing, carried out in partnership with Adobe, polled over 650 digital marketing professionals of both large brands and small and medium-sized businesses to track the trends for managing and measuring the value of social media. It found that although two-thirds of client-side marketing experts at enterprise-level businesses believe that social media is a key element of strategy, just 20% of them have a reliable tool to collect and assess data generated through such platforms. According to 70% of the respondents, social media needs to be more rooted in data, yet about three quarters consider that measuring social data is a very difficult thing to do.

The research further revealed that a vast number of businesses fail to identify the right approach to measuring the benefits they get by appearing in the social space, with only 28% of smaller businesses and 42% of larger organisations having a clue about how to track their results against pre-defined social media objectives. According to Linus Gregoriadis, Econsultancy research director, marketers can be deluged with data from a wide range of tools for monitoring, managing and measuring social activity and the challenge is to sift through this and find the relevant information for their marketing campaigns and business objectives.