Is there a downside to social media metrics?

Businesses are increasingly imposing metrics on social media activity to make it measurable. But is there a danger that this will ultimately undermine its real value? Mark Stuart, head of research at the Chartered Institute of Marketing, explores.

One of the key advantages of the internet is how measurable it is. You know exactly how many people visit your website, and you can tell exactly how many of these visits convert into sales. The same theory applies to social media. Fan pages on Facebook, or special offer alerts on Twitter, can be measured so that you can see how many of your followers become sales leads. Dell reportedly made $3.5m in under six months from Twitter; its DellOutlet page has almost 1.5 million followers, which the company uses as a viral system. Discount offers are posted daily, and these posts are often re-tweeted.

This, the argument goes, is how you prove that time spent on social media sites is time well spent. There's still a level of suspicion about social media sites; whether or not they are a fad, and whether or not companies should really be spending time there when there are other things they could be getting on with. The fact that web metrics can be precisely applied and the value (or otherwise) of a particular campaign monitored is seen as a key advantage of proving whether or not social network usage works for business or not.

However, this misses an essential point - which is that imposing such precise metrics on the internet reduces it to a mere acquisition tool. Most companies would accept, when they run a TV or radio campaign, that much of it is impossible to measure; and understand that just because something cannot be specifically evaluated, it does not therefore mean there are not valuable reasons for being there. The same should hold for social networks.

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