Only half of marketers measure social traffic

Home Only half of marketers measure social traffic

More than half (54%) of North American marketers measure the traffic volume generated by social media, according to the Q2 2011 Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing from Adobe and Econsultancy, via MarketingCharts. A similar 53% also measure engagement with their Facebook brand page and Twitter accounts. Half of the marketers DOES measure something….. That’s the positive way of describing the results. You could also say, that half of the marketers still doesn’t measure any social volume and engagement. Should they?
Starting somewhere
Of course, they should. Either you play the social game, or you stay at home crying that your marketing efforts don’t work that well anymore. Ok, that’s a bit bold and of course, we should start SOMEWHERE, half of the marketers is more than no marketer at all, but the report is showing that the adoptation by marketers is running more slowly than we would think. While a low 31% of marketers currently measure the value of social media traffic volume according to the eConsultancy report, a high 91% say this metric is important. So…. they say or know it’s important. But little actions are being taken….

A combined 94% of the marketers say social media marketing will be “highly†or “quite†significant in 2015. Other social media trends or tactics with a high percentage predicting near-term importance include social media for user-generated ideas/content (86%), social media for customer service (84%) and the usage of Facebook as a direct channel for e-commerce (64%).

Other findings
Other findings MarketingCharts’s summed up for you:

  • 55% of marketers agree measuring the impact of social media marketing is very difficult.
  • 64% of marketers agree content marketing is more important than advertising.
  • 62% of marketers agree customer service is a primary sales channel.
  • 17% of marketers say social media is currently highly significant to customer service in terms of impact on their organization, but 46% say it will be highly significant by 2015.
  • Only 1% of marketers rate their organization excellent for using social media to improve customer service, while 60% rate it weak.

About the Data
The Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing is based on an online survey of more than 900 client-side and agency respondents. Adobe and Econsultancy promoted the survey to their respective user bases. The sample included 247 respondents based in North America, out of which 108 were client-side (in-company) and 139 were supply-side (mainly agencies).

How are brands defined?
An also very interesting finding/conclusion eConsultancy’s made for people who believe in conversation management, listening cultures and conversation companies is the following:

“The vast majority of respondents believe that brands must ‘participate in an ongoing conversation with customers’, but only 39% believe that their brands are ‘defined by their customers conversing online’.”

Very curious what you think about these conclusision. Are brands defined by the people conversating online. Or are brands defined at the marketing department? What do you believe?