Social Media - Features Well Suited for a New Channel

This week, Marketing Sherpa's survey found that Facebook PPC spending is on the rise among marketers. In fact, in their survey 17% of search marketers used Facebook for PPC marketing.


In addition, Forrester Research came out recently with their US Interactive Marketing Forecast for 2009-2014. They predict:

• 1.9 billion in Integrated Social Media Campaign Spending by 2014
• 1.3 billion in agency fees attributed to Social Media by 2014

Great news for agencies and those involved in social media marketing management! The challenge? Right now most conversations tie you to the platform (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) and provide little insight into how to measure a brand impact over the entire channel of social media in terms familiar to marketers (segments, lifestage and lifecycle messaging etc). In addition, there are few products out there which streamline monitoring conversation, nor provide a blueprint for improving ROI when investing in this challenging new media. What's needed?

• Campaign management that spans across social networks. You answer questions on LinkedIn, monitor your brand in Twitter Search, and check posts to your brand fan page on Facebook. All with different logins, and duct-tape monitoring. Isn't it time for a product that monitored these for you - and allowed you to manage these from one place?

• Tools that make your social media hat a little easier to wear. If you get a brand complaint, wouldn't it be great if a tool auto-recommended an approach on how to handled it? Better yet, had workflow to assign to customer support or sales, regardless of which social network, wiki or website the comment came from?

• Framework for measuring success. You can track traffic coming from social networks, and you can count new followers, but who are these individuals and how do they differ in frequency, spend, and ultimately profit for all the hours invested in social media? A social media tool should also provide a framework for linking social media to the bottom line, no matter how long thecycle from conversation to purchase - especially in these times.

• Turn-key data integration. It should be easier to integrate you social media presence with traffic you you website and interaction with mobile and email channels. Any product out there should have open APIs to provide a big picture glance at the performance of the entire online channel.