Following is a guest post by John Lewis  fromwww.overstocksilver.com .If you want to write guest posts for us do read our write for us page.

Though social media marketing has become a standard item for inclusion in business marketing plans and a hot topic of discussion throughout the business community in recent years, it is still a venue in which the return on investment (ROI) is difficult to measure. This leads many businesses, particularly those who are tightening their advertising and marketing budgets, to shy away from investing the kind of time and energy necessary for driving a successful social media marketing effort.

Quantifying Social Media Marketing Success

When it come to measuring success in marketing efforts, best practices in the business world lean toward hard metrics, or those in which the connection between marketing expenses and increased sales or revenue is extremely clear. Collecting quantifiable data for hard metrics in a social media marketing campaign can be very difficult, if not downright impossible, for many organizations. For this reason, most businesses depend on soft metrics as a means of measuring the success of social media marketing activities.

The Importance of Soft Metrics

Though soft metrics do not establish a clear and undeniable connection between investment in social media marketing and ROI, most businesses and marketing professionals understand the powerful connection that business reputation, brand recognition and networking have on the bottom line. Soft metrics give businesses data to analyze and information from which they can establish marketing-related goals.

Using Soft Metrics in Social Media Marketing

While drawing a clear line from brand recognition achieved through social media activities to increased sales may not be possible, soft metrics like the number of “fans” your business has on Facebook is measurable. Likewise, you can track the number of comments you receive on Facebook or the number of times your tweets are retweeted on Twitter as quantifiable indicators of the success of your social media marketing.  Establishing measurable and meaningful goals is an important aspect of a strategic marketing plan and soft metrics are a means of accomplishing this for the social media portions of your 2012 marketing activities.

Clearing the Path for Hard Metrics in Social Media Marketing

Eventually, marketing professionals will determine more efficient means of quantifying the ROI for social media marketing in general. You may be able to do so now with your own business by examining the promotional activities you undertake through social media platforms. For instance, retail businesses that share coupons or special discount codes via their social media pages can clearly track the success of those promotions, provided they have the right recordkeeping methods in place.

Looking at the Bigger Picture in 2012

Social media, for better or worse, is a part of any strategic marketing plan for 2012. How you capitalize on social media is up to you. For the best results and the clearest image of the bigger marketing picture, you should consider ways of capturing both hard and soft metrics. Soft metrics can be much easier to come up with and to measure. Hard metrics may be more difficult, but with some focused attention and innovative thinking, there are bound to be at least a couple of ways in which to incorporate them in your 2012 social media marketing performance measures.

[Image credit-http://www.flickr.com/photos/socialmediamarketinglinkedmedia/5183646214/]

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Tagged in: Business • Social Media • social media marketing

Written by john lewis

This post is written by John Lewis and he works at PriceCollate. You can checkout the blog of website here.

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