Companies around the world are just now tuning in to the power and benefits of social media as a marketing tool for their businesses. Social media provides both business and consumers the ability to interact and actively participate in the “community of brands”. Social media as a marketing channel provides customers the ability to participate in building or even breaking brands, while giving businesses valuable marketing intelligence on their products and services. Social media sites give consumers the ability to to show other interested consumers how they are using a particular product and benefiting from it, creating powerful word of mouth viral marketing.
Effective social media marketing provides a mechanism for companies to spread the word about their products and services quickly and creatively and empowers consumers to respond quickly about those products and services, creating one of the most revolutionary customer feedback loops for consumers and brands alike.
Forums, online communities, blogs, live casts, social bookmarking sites, user review sites, multimedia sharing, micro blogging, and social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. With all the new technology out there, it is vital for businesses to track the ROI of all of their marketing activities, including their brand reputations’. Companies are scrambling to ensure that their expenditures in social media can be justified as sound investments that will, in fact, add to the company’s bottom line in a definitive way. While measuring the ROI of social media marketing is crucial, it has proven to be somewhat tricky as the total measured benefit of the channel goes far beyond the more traditional measurements of ROI in marketing and media.
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