Among popular social marketing channels, user-generated content stands out for driving return on investment: 73% of surveyed CMOs say their companies facilitate customer ratings and reviews; and among those, 59% report average or significant ROI—making ratings and reviews the top social strategy to generate measurable return, according to a report by Bazaarvoice and the CMO Club.
Corporate/brand communities ranked second in generating average or significant ROI in 2010 (56%), followed by corporate/brand blogs (48%), Facebook (45%), participation in industry blogs and forums (41%), Twitter (31%), and LinkedIn (28%).
Though measurement remains a challenge, improvements in ROI were recorded in 2010 across all social channels analyzed, compared with 2009 levels.
Even so, more than one-half of CMOs (54%) say they were unable to tie any revenue to their social media efforts in 2010. They are, however, optimistic: 74% of CMOs say they predict they'll find the "missing link" between social media and revenue in 2011. Only 7% say they don't plan on tracking social metrics at all.
Below, other findings from the Bazaarvoice and The CMO Club report titled CMOs on Social Marketing Plans for 2011.
Key Metrics
Customer engagement metrics are still the most commonly used among CMOs: 68% use website traffic to measure their social marketing activities, followed by numbers of fans/members (59%), positive customer mentions (53%), page views (51%), and numbers of contributors (43%).
