I\’ve been talking about social media a lot lately and one of the questions that comes up time and time again is how effective it is.
It\’s not an easy question to answer.
Ask me how effective an AdSense placement is and I can open my AdSense journal, look at the stats and tell you exactly how much extra I earned when I moved an ad unit on that page from here to there. I\’ll be able to tell you the click-through rate, the price per click and the effect of the change on the page\’s eCPM.
Ask me how much I earn per tweet, and I couldn\’t tell you.
Social media just doesn\’t work that way.
That doesn\’t mean it doesn\’t work. But its most powerful effects are difficult to measure in the kind of numerical terms that we can see in online advertising.
I can tell you, for example, that when I asked 43,000 Twitter followers to name their favorite color, I received 240 replies in the space of two hours. (Other major twitterers have seen similar results in their experiments).
But I don\’t know how many people saw that tweet. I suspect that if I had sent the tweet at a different time of day, asked for retweets, or repeated it to ensure it was seen by more of my followers than those that happened to be on the site in the couple of hours after I sent it, I would have received a different number of replies.
And those figures are just the tip of the iceberg. They only tell me how many followers on Twitter at that moment felt a close enough relationship to me to take part in my conversation. There were certainly many others who read my time-line regularly who prefer to stay in the background, just as there are people at every party who prefer to listen than talk. That\’s their choice.
While responsiveness is certainly one way to measure the effectiveness of social media then, it\’s not the whole story. The depth of the relationship you build with your market through social media can\’t be described in numbers.
At least, not until you start selling products and spot the increase in sales.