In the first 24 hours upon its’ release, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” smashed U.S. sales records by selling 6.9 million copies in the United States alone. It took J.K. Rowling over a year to write, but took only an hour to make millions. With any task or campaign one engages in, the ROI on the project is at the top of the list. Whether it be selling a book or a new TV commercial for your product, the ROI is how success is judged. With the explosion of social media marketing, companies often find themselves going through the motions of creating Twitter accounts and Facebook fan pages, but without any true understanding of “why.” This is due in part to the difficulty in measuring ROI for social media.

The Conflict of Push Marketing and Social Media

The biggest reason why it is difficult to measure the ROI of social media campaigns stems from the premise of social media itself. When sites like Twitter and Facebook were started, the immediate goal wasn’t to monetize it, but rather to create a platform that allowed users to interact, share, and network with one another in a seamless and simplistic manner. As these platforms gained popularity, it also began to attract marketers and companies that were exploring new ways to ‘push’ their product out there.

Here in lies the problem. The concept of ‘push’ marketing is one that is used by most if not all companies, and involves creating a product and actively reaching out to consumers in hopes that they will buy it. Traditionally, this involved an assortment of strategies including cold-calling, advertisements, and extensive marketing campaigns all of which were geared toward and increase in sales. Here, a successful campaign involves an ROI where money was made. Plain and simple. Continue Reading…