63% of marketers are already using social media marketing while more than half of those who aren’t currently involved said they were planning on jumping in probably within the next year. But why? Extra Mile Audience Research conducted a study for PivotCon and here’s what they found out:

People said they used social media marketing because:

– We realized that social media marketing is a powerful tool for brands or products 70%

– Our audience is on social media sites 62%

– We saw that social media users/always-on consumers gather information differently 47%

– To use social media as part of our customer support and relationship management 40%

The study also indicated that almost all marketers planned to increase their expenditures in this area. So, that’s a lot of people who believe that social media is worth throwing money at. But here’s the interesting part,

“43% of marketers who conduct social media marketing have not begun implementing any measurement or analysis programs.”

Then add this:

“Despite all of the focus and investment in social media marketing, only 30% consider their social media marketing efforts “very successful.” 59% rate their efforts as “somewhat successful.”

Where else is this kind of return on investment acceptable? Think about this in real life. You take your car to the mechanic who is supposed to be the best in town. You pay him to make your car “run better” but you don’t define what constitutes “better.” You drive away later poorer and no wiser. I wouldn’t call that a success.

You’d never stand for this in the marketing world outside of social media, either. If you paid an advertising agency money to deliver an effective campaign and they came back with a bill and piece of paper that said, we “think” it worked, you wouldn’t hire these people again.

And yet, we return to Twitter and Facebook and YouTube over and over with no plan, no means of measurement and all because we believe these are “powerful tools.”

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t use social media, you should, but why not apply the same standards you’d use in any other situation. Why settle for “somewhat successful?”

Of the small percentage who did say that have a plan, 93% of them said they use website data trackers and Google analytics to measure the success of the program. 56% said they were using some kind of Twitter analytics and an even smaller number was using link tracking tools.

Social Media is still in its infancy so I have no doubt that in the next year or two there will be more sophisticated tools for tracking the effectiveness of a retweet or a Facebook “like”. But that doesn’t mean we should all sit and wait. Find what you can measure and set a goal. Maybe it’s an additional number of followers, or counting the clickthroughs on one promotional tweet, maybe you want to raise the number of people who comment on your YouTube video or grab a widget for use on their own blog. There’s no proof that any of these things will help your profit margin rise, but keeping your name in front of the public can’t hurt.

For more information, download the free full report at PivotCon.com.

Do you have social media goals? And if so, how do you measure your success?