Advice offered on measuring social media ROI

Organisations have been offered guidance on how to measure the return on investment(ROI) of social media.

Writing in social networking news blog Mashable, social media consultant Aaron Uhrmacher said that firms can use a mixture of quantitative and qualitative techniques.

First, he suggested, companies should determine what they want to measure. For example, they may be interested in corporate reputation or customer relationships.

Then, they can assess the ROI of their social media offerings by determining such things as to what extent they are currently part of discussions about the products they offer and how they are talked about compared to their competitors.

In addition, quantitative measurements can be employed, such as how many people have joined a social network in a given period of time and what the click-through rate is to product pages.

According to a study conducted earlier this year by Beeline Labs, Deloitte and the Society for New Communications Research, the greatest value of online communities is word of mouth, followed by raising brand awareness.