These marketers defined it as “ …seeking to influence social behaviours not to benefit the marketer but to benefit the target audience and the general society.” It in short, created a dialogue between consumers and the brand and leveraging the value that was created in that process.

Social media is primarily Internet based: whilst your website provides company and product information and Internet tools such as search, pay-per-click, and webinars enable customers to reach further, social media is all about leveraging the connecting of people through dialogue and the formation of networks.

Social media is one part of the marketers’ multi-channel marketing tool kit. Its importance is in its ability to get under the skin of the consumer and gain invaluable insights into attitudes and behaviour of the consumer.

Social media sites represent a major entry into the internet. As current data from Alexa demonstrates, users spend more time on social networks in an average day than do most major portals like Google and Yahoo (as we point out here in Where do we spend most our time online).

So how do we measure social media?

We are in an age of metrics. There is a constant pressure to measure the effects of every activity and to refine and reassess every aspect of the marketing budget. Marketers are asked to be effective (do the right thing) and be efficient (do the thing right).

So we use return on investment (ROI) as a measurement of output (return) from input (investment).

One of the dangers of measuring everything that is done within the marketing context, is moving to the default tactic of using communication tools that are more easily and accurately measurable. The problem with this is that the most effective channels of communication are not always easily measurable. This is especially true in social media marketing where qualitative measurement is needed rather than quantitative.

Marketing Sherpas carried out a Social Media Marketing and PR Benchmark Study in 2008. (See the chart below).

How accurately can you gauge the ROI of Social Media tactics?

What this study demonstrates is that the respondents feel that advertising on blogs or social networks are the most easily and accurately measured. The cost of “advertising on blogs or social networks” is usually based on pay-per-click and conversion metrics, so advertisers are more motivated to use these tools and are more easily able to measure these tactics.

Near the bottom of the chart is “blogging on a company blog.” With this there are fewer direct costs other than staff time. This means that there is little inclination to measure the return on investment.

However, there can be considerable return if you measure this on a qualitative basis. Here we need to measure the quality of the comments on the blog rather than the quantity. You can have many comments but if the majority are negative then I would suggest that this particular metric is unhelpful. It underpins the need for quality measurement to be able to gain a deeper and richer insight and to see if the blog is, in Kotler and Zaltman’s metric, “ …seeking to influence social behaviours not to benefit the marketer but to benefit the target audience and the general society.” Quite simply, if a blog is seen to be placing a blatant brand message it has a far lesser impact than if it is seen as authentic, balanced and objective. The latter is far more effective for brand development.

The ability to measure qualitative values in these blog interactions is more challenging but not overtly difficult. If we don’t include qualitative factors in the measurement of effectiveness and efficiency, then we will find ourselves utilising marketing tools that are more easily measured, rather than those that more fully meet the brand’s development objectives.

So, even if social media is producing a good return in terms of a quantitative metric, if it isn’t increasing the business outcome it will be necessary to review the content of your social media programme and investigate and refine how you are measuring its contribution to your business objectives.

To Find out more about Social Media and how you can get a decent return on your investment give IP-SEO a call.

Contributor – Garry Titterton, CEO IP-SEO and Author of Brand Storming.

Monthly Attention – Facebook, Yahoo, Google, MySpace

(The total time spent on a domain as a percentage of the total time spent online by all U.S. Internet users, February ‘07 – February ‘09) from compete.com

This is pretty interesting stuff. But what we can see from this data is the sharp fall of Myspace in June 07 and another cliff-like drop exactly a year later in June 08. Myspace however has had more support in the US and therefore longevity. Though time spent drastically reduced. After you have spent time building the look and feel of your page, there wasn’t a hell of a lot more to spend your time on. So was this drop due to the relatively unfriendly usability of the site, or the comparatively single dimension experience?


Saying this however, search data has been strong for Myspace over the last 12 months, Facebook only overtaking them in the first month of this year. As you will see from the trends graph (US only. A worldwide chart shows Facebook dominating MS many months before)

Trends - Facebook takes Myspace at the Last

So search has no affect on the length of time the audience stay on the site.


We’ve all got our own opinions about the qualities of Myspace and Facebook, usability issues and the types of people and behaviour related to each. These ultimately are the reasons why one is succeeding and the other has seen better days. Why one was bought for record amounts by a media mogul and why the other surely will be, and will definitely make the owner a billionaire.


As for Google’s position in this data… well Yahoo has all the web-mail time spent on it, but Google (a few seconds for each search) is fast catching. This time next year, it will be the big G out in front.


Author Sam

Facebook’s UK audience grew by over 100% during the past 12 months to total 17.6m unique users. This figure concretes the lead over Myspace and Bebo which grew by just 7% and 6% respectively last year.


MySpace UK’s audience now exceeds 5.4m, ahead of youth-focused network Bebo which has 4.3m unique UK users in January, less than a quarter of the premier netowrking site Facebook.


But these dominant figures don’t just stop at vistors or click throughs to the site. The chasm forming between Facebook and its rivals was also seen in the time users spent on each of the social network sites, perhaps more of a real reflection on the quality and usabilty of the experience. Facebook users averaged almost 6 hours a month – i repeat – AVERAGE – a 128% increase on last year, but MySpace dropped nearly 50% with users averaging 47 minutes on the site, pretty good if you take away their much more omnipresent competitor, but dwarfed nonetheless. This figure however is down from one and a half hours the previous year, a high that is still a third of Facebook’s omnipitent position.


Bebo user behaviour remained stable, however, and its members averaging one and a half hours on the site in January 2008 and 2009.


Nielsen Online the stats and web user analysts quite obviously pointed out that Facebook’s online dominance was looking good……


“The growth in time users are spending on the site is particularly impressive considering that it might get huge numbers of people coming to the site to see what all the fuss is about but then finding it’s not for them,” he said. “MySpace is struggling as its audience has plateaued in the last couple of years and has been more of a casualty of Facebook than Bebo.


“Facebook has the audience and users, but conventional wisdom is that MySpace generates more ad revenue. If Facebook gets its demographic targeting right, the potential is enormous,” Burmaster added.


To comment, yes maybe Myspace may have more Ad revenue, but who cares? Facebook have many many more users and five times more stickability – I’d rather have more attention and better quality service than a short term ad capaign, read into that what you like. If Facebook’s whole lifeplan was to make money from ads then it will almost certianly kill the golden goose – so well done Mark for holding off on that.


It seems to me that Myspace has gone down in the recent past because it has suddenly become an advertising revenue source. However, when i first read these figures, i felt for Facebook – like with Google, Apple and Yahoo before them, when a fad becomes mainstream, and then behemoth, it loses its charm, and therefore its appeal, then the corps get involved, then the hackers kick in. Will Facebook go the same way as Myspace and MSN? Who knows, but Twitter you should watch with anticipation.


Author Sam

Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of the ever popular social networking site “Facebook”, said today that the site will be returning to its original ‘terms of service agreement’ with regards to stored user data. This change of the site’s ‘terms of service’ agreement hasn’t even been made apparent to the majority of users until now. If you have a Facebook account, you should see that Mark Zuckerberg has personally posted a site wide bulletin stating that all will return to normal.

Not much had changed in regards to the written language of the document, however, it was re-worded in the manner to which seemed to suggest that Facebook would own the rights to any personal information ever exchanged between their servers, even if the user chose to delete there account. This in effect means that Facebook would have the ownership rights of any picture, video, personal comment, message, birthdate and contact information ever made/accquired. In Mr Zuckerberg’s defense, he said “it was to better reflect how people used the site” and that should someone delete “his or her account, any comments or messages he or she had left on a friend’s Facebook page would not also disappear”.

In Mr Zuckerberg’s most recent blog entry, he said: “the past couple of days, we received a lot of questions and comments about the changes and what they mean for people and their information. Based on this feedback, we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.”

Mr Zuckerberg also said that “Our next version will be a substantial revision from where we are now. It will reflect the principles I described yesterday around how people share and control their information, and it will be written clearly in language everyone can understand.”

Author Paul