If You Think Social Media Marketing is Worthless, You’re Doing it Wrong

Has your company spent seemingly countless hours tweeting on Twitter, networking on Facebook and writing the company blog? Have you found yourself wondering if it’s all a waste of time? Maybe that last Facebook fan page contest saw fewer entries than you’d hoped for, or that last Twitter-only coupon had fewer redemptions than you’d expected, but perhaps that’s not all that matters.

According to the the latest report by analyst firm Forrester, many people are looking at the face-value dollars and cents of social media marketing and, put simply, they’re doing it wrong. Beyond clicks and coupon redemptions there lies a case for social media marketing that shows its value is well beyond what we see on the surface.

Analyst and report author Augie Ray writes in a blog post this morning that traditional measurements of success for return on investment in social media marketing lead to an incomplete picture.