Vitrue released a study this week that caused quite a stir in the social media world. eMarketer recaps some of these reactions on their blog today, and also was able to chat with Vitrue’s CEO about the methodology behind the valuation. Here are a few key points Reggie makes:
Our intent was to just focus on the earned media facet for now and come out with a subsequent study on the engagement value, which would be an incremental value on top of the media value.
This study didn’t look at shares, comments or likes, which I think are probably an even better set of information for marketers to understand. We only looked at the message a marketer creates [and the media value when that message appears in fans’ news feeds]. We decided to start with understanding the earned media value and add to it as we go along.
The broader point is why you need a meaningful presence on Facebook and why a million fans matters to a large marketer. Large marketers need to aggregate a large presence on Facebook.
Cracking the social media ROI code is something on every marketer’s mind. Vitrue’s study is definitely a great conversation starter, but marketers need to incorporate a combination of evolved metrics when assessing their social media strategies. The struggle will continue to be that traditional metrics with dollar amounts don’t always work in the dynamic environment of social media. Traditional ROI isn’t the true value of social media, the benefits of consumer engagement is what’s important. Marketers need to identify a mix of traditional and social KPI’s and build a custom dashboard of evolved metrics tied to objectives and goals.
Do you have any best practices to share? How can brands gets the most of of their social media initiatives?
Stacy is a Strategist in the Digital Innovation Group at Engauge. She has an M.S. in Integrated Marketing Communications from Northwestern's Medill School. Connect with her on Twitter @stacycohen. 