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Social Media ROI : Are we over it? I did a quick comparison using Google’s Insights for Search tool, comparing the searches for ‘Social Media ROI’ to ‘Social Media Monitoring’.
The results are in the picture above — with some rough trends lines (black) inserted on top. “Social Media ROI” searches are in light blue on the bottom. “Social Media Monitoring” is the top red line.
“Social Media ROI” seemed to be all the rage last year (according to my non-scientific ‘gut’ feeling) and the search data shows this term seemed to peak in late 2011/early 2012. But the search for ‘Social Media ROI’ isn’t increasing much anymore and may be on the way down. The next few months will be a good test to see if search interest is falling.
In recent months, a lot of tools have come out offering to measure Social Media ROI for businesses, which always seems a little dodgy to me. My view is that social media ROI is very specific to a particular business, the social media goals of that organization and the overall marketing goals. I think ROI measurement warrants special attention by an in-house research or analytics team and I can’t see a generic tool accurately or competently measuring social media ROI on its own.
So I wonder if our excitement over social media ROI has been tempered by the realization that it’s more difficult to measure than expected? Or if businesses are leaving social media ROI to generic software?
