Regardless of whether you are responsible for the social media marketing of a small, medium or enterprise-sized brand, chances are you are having a difficult time measuring its social media program's return on investment (ROI).
The new 2015 Social Media Marketing Trends report authored by TrustRadius, a peer review site for business software, found this to be the most commonly cited challenge, followed by "Tying social activities to business outcomes" (a similar challenge) and "Developing our social media strategy."
Despite the challenges, marketers still need to prove their efforts on social media count for something. Many have turned to "engagement" metrics (such as likes, shares, etc.) as the most important metric for evaluating success, followed by audience size and website traffic.
To do so, companies are using an average of three different tools to report and analyze their social media activities. The most commonly used tools are the analytics offered natively in social media networks (64 percent of respondents), a social media management tool (62 percent), a Web analytics tool (59 percent), and spreadsheets (46 percent).