Businesses are not tracking ROI of Social Media

According to Mashable.com (one of my favorite blogs that I read every day), 80% of all online businesses and corporations are not tracking Social Media ROI or perhaps don’t even know how!

Probably not surprising to most, but to me it was a real shocker. Corporations, big business and little businesses are spending money to BE on social media and have someone manage it, To advertise on it, to sponsor tweets, to sponsor blog posts etc.

Even less encouraging, more than 40% of respondents said they didn’t even know whether they could track ROI from their social tools. This is worrisome because it indicates that industries and professionals are adopting technology without actually taking into account how it will impact their business and what value it will add. – Mashable.com

Facebook considers itself worth $6.5 Billion dollars, Twitter at least 1 billion and other properties like Myspace being declared at being worth 65 Billion dollars, does anyone else detect a huge bubble soon to burst?

First off, if you’re going to do social media advertising, setup campaigns, specific landing pages and goal tracking within Google Analytics. Ensure you track 100% ROI. If the property doesn’t make you money, don’t continue to invest, simple? I think so!

Eventually, systems will get more sophisticated and people will stop using these as they’ll realize their money is better spent in more trackable and realistic returns. I think in truth, the reason Facebook has no built-in tracking system to their PPC program like Google, Yahoo & Microsoft have is because they’d hate to loose the advertisers who would quickly realize it’s lack of return.

Maybe that’s a little bold, what do you think?

Daniel J Deyette