Recent Social Media Research

The noise surrounding social media is beginning to get filtered out. Being a "social media guru" holds less clout now that social media is demystified and everyone's parents are on Facebook. Most businesses acknowledge social media's potential, and the writing about it has improved as a result.

The articles below, which I used for an upcoming article about commercial real estate and social media, are examples of this improvement. They are either quantitative surveys about the business usage of social media or qualitative articles about social media models for businesses.

• Social Media: The Three Big Myths (Gallup Management Journal, Sept. 2011) – One of the myths of social media, according to the authors, is that it can be used to drive customer acquisition. They point out that our friends and family are far more likely to influence our purchasing decisions than branded social media pages (see image). The other two myths debunked in the article: Social networking is an online-only phenomenon; all social networks are the same. 

• Putting Social Media to Work (Bain & Company, Sept. 2011) – This article offers the most actionable information. It also complements the Gallup article, which makes the case for engaging your audience. According to the Bain & Co. authors, customers who are engaged with companies over social media are more loyal and spend 20 – 40 percent more with those companies.
• Campaigns to Capabilities: Social Media and Marketing 2011 (Booz & Co., Oct. 2011) – This quantitative survey has 15 pages of stats on how "North American marketers" are using social media. Among the findings: 96 percent of companies plan to allocate "substantially more" or "somewhat more" resources to social media.

I was interested in seeing how analytics and measurement would be covered. The articles generally make the point that measurement is important, but there’s not a new and valid measurement technique for social media. Sentiment and influence scoring tools show some promise, but their accuracy is debatable and they offer only a partial picture.

I think companies that already had techniques for monitoring their KPIs will most easily be able to monitor social media’s impact. For example, the Bain & Co. article shows how the Net Promoter Score—a customer satisfaction measurement they developed before social media was big—can be applied to social media. Companies that don't have monitoring techniques can use this as an opportunity to begin measuring all marketing initiatives, not just social media.