Companies use Facebook and Twitter for marketing and customer engagement. However, the ability to measure and maximize marketing return on investment, ROI, may differ across platforms. We’ve heard that compared to Twitter, Facebook is easier for marketers to understand the financial return on investment of a social media campaign. For those firms that are committed to building community engagement on all social media platforms, here are two critical reasons why it may be hard to calculate ROI on Twitter.

Facebook Fan Pages vs. Tweet Streams:
Facebook fan pages are essentially microsites that give social media marketers the ability to see how customers interact with their brand on Facebook web pages. In contrast, tweet streams are live, real-time, engagements that may consist of multiple conversations conducted across multiple hashtags and communities. Firms that have thousands of fans can easily verify and respond to fan activity on Facebook pages quickly. However, on Twitter, analytics tools offer limited insight into the quality of community engagement with a particular brand. The best way to track activity would be to keep up with each discussion on Twitter, over time. However, without some form of automation, that would be impossible for social media marketers to manually accomplish.

Promoted Tweets are nearly here but most marketers still wait:
Twitter’s Promoted Tweets will soon arrive to deliver Facebook-like ads to marketers seeking to invest advertising dollars on Twitter. Promoted Tweets show promise to deliver targeted advertising that will ensure that the right community sees the right message. Given that conversations are happening now, social media marketers cannot afford to wait until Promoted Tweets arrive. They still need to engage in community conversation and share valuable information regarding their products and services. Many companies are still taking a “wait and see” approach to Twitter marketing while their customers and their competitors engage each other today.

Therefore, determining your return maybe more simple on Facebook, but you should not be ignoring or waiting to use Twitter as a social media channel. Social Media Marketers should be aware that measuring and improving Twitter ROI will be difficult until the tools develop and mature. However, firms should not “wait and see” if Twitter can deliver additional reach and influence as successful firms already leverage Twitter to deliver increased marketing impact. Waiting only ensures that firms that learn how to extract the maximum value from social media will extend their edge in the real-time business arena.

Tags: advertising, communities, Engagement, Facebook, hashtag, marketing roi, real-time, ROI, Social Media, tweets, twitter, Twitter ROI

This entry was posted on Monday, December 20th, 2010 at 12:02 PM by Taariq Lewis and is filed under Twitter ROI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.