A Social Marketing Experiment

Now, what is the effectiveness of Social Media Marketing versus other Web Marketing channels?

A few months ago, MarketingExperiments.com conducted a very interesting experiment testing the ROI potential of Social Media Marketing and Optimization versus Pay Per Click search advertising. Over a 12 month period, they performed a variety of social marketing activities such as submitting 44 viral videos to YouTube and engaging their targeted community by commenting on blogs and dialoguing in specific social networks and forums. They hired an employee at $10 an hour to blog, build content and to “get social” in the industry-specific communities. Ultimately, they were testing the difference in cost and ROI between a PPC campaign (with an average bid of $.75cents) versus that of a social marketing initiative run by a part-time blogger.

Their findings proved to be very interesting! Their Social Marketing campaign yielded a 1,427% greater return on their investment, then if they ran a Google adwords campaign over a 12 month period! Now, it is important to note that they only ran the Google adwords campaign for a 1 month period, so it is hard to accurately gauge the overall performance then if they had run a 12 month PPC campaign. Nonetheless, through their social marketing efforts, they spent $3600 in wages over the year for the part-time position and saw over 93, 000 unique visits to their respective sites during that time period. (An average of $.04 cents cost per visit) Now, there was certainly a great deal of trial and error involved during this experiment, but the results certainly revealed the power of Social Media Marketing. I would recommend taking a read of their findings at MarketingExperiments.com.

Is Social Media Marketing a worthwhile investment of your time and marketing budget? My answer is an emphatic YES! In this new Web, where user-generated content and collaboration reign supreme, businesses have a prime opportunity to connect with a highly targeted audience in a cost-effective manner. Social Media Marketing, much like SEO, does not necessarily yield a fast return on investment, but has great potential for increasing search listings and expanding targeted exposure over the long term!