One of social media's big selling points is the high degree of user engagement it generally produces -- but paradoxically this "stickiness" may also be a liability, as heavily-engaged users are also less likely to follow links leading to sites outside the social media universe. At least, that's the conclusion I draw from some interesting research findings just released by ForeSee Results.
Overall, fewer than 1% of visits to Web sites come directly from a social media URL, according to ForeSee, which conducted 300,000 consumer surveys on more than 180 Web sites across the private and public sectors, the Department of Defense, Drugstore.com, General Mills, ESPN, Express, Kellogg, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Ticketmaster, Sears, and Suntrust.
That figure compares with study findings from ISL Consulting suggesting that as much as 61% of all Web site visits come from search engines, with 41% coming from Google organic search alone; another study found that 85% of initial Web site visits come via search engines. The disparity between the proportion of Web site traffic coming from social media and search is even more remarkable when you remember that people spend more time overall on social media. Clearly, search remains a more effective platform for connecting consumers directly to Web sites (provided, of course, marketers are diligent in areas like SEO and SEM).
But this doesn't mean that social media has no impact on online behavior: ForeSee also hastened to point out that 18% of visitors to Web sites report being influenced by social media to visit that Web site -- even if this isn't immediately obvious from clickstream data. ForeSee, which explicitly aims to go beyond traditional metrics such as referring URLs or raw counts of tweets and Facebook followers, is presenting these figures as benchmarks so marketers can see how they stack up in indirect attribution.
Indeed, ForeSee president and CEO Larry Freed stated: "What this tells us is that traditional clickstream metrics don't give us a full picture of what value social media efforts are bringing to our business. Companies have long been able to count how many Facebook fans, how many Tweets, and how many people click through ads on social sites, but they haven't had a way to calculate a tangible return on investment for social media efforts, not to mention other marketing initiatives. Now they can."
This is an interesting attempt to grapple with ROI, which remains one of the main issues facing social media: a big part of solving the ROI problem will undoubtedly be figuring out how to measure indirect contributions of social media to brand awareness and affinity, as expressed through Web site visits as well as offline behavior, including visits to brick-and-mortar retail and so on. However I feel like a bigger, more basic question is still hanging there, as marketers still haven't figured out how to determine the value of some of the more simple indicators cited by Freed -- for example number of fans, followers, Tweet brand mentions, etc.
Clearly social media measurement is still in its infancy, but it needs to grow up fast if marketers are going to maintain and increase their investments in the long term. I am the first to admit this is a tall order, in view of the rapid rate of change: it's like the whole world is a moving target.
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