The social media world is dealing with return-on-investment like the shambling, many-headed hydra that it is — meaning, slowly and in piecemeal fashion. After several years of deafening silence, 2011 has seen some promising starts, with tentative attempts to demonstrate and quantify connections between social media exposure, brand perception, and sales lift.
The most recent ROI offering comes from Ogilvy and ChatThreads, which conducted a "Integrated Social Media Sales Impact" study from January-May of this year, tracking brand exposure for 404 individuals through ChatThreads' BrandEncounter platform. Ogilvy and ChatThreads looked at purchases by quick service restaurant customers patronizing KFC, McDonalds, Subway, Taco Bell and Wendy's; the customers were sorted by their degree of exposure to social media advertising for the QSR brand in question, as well as their exposure to advertising delivered through other channels.
The data are interesting, to say the least, because consumers who were exposed exclusively to social media showed greater purchase proclivity than consumers who were exposed to social media in tandem with other advertising platforms. For example, consumers who were exposed exclusively to social media ads for KFC were seven times more likely to spend more than the average consumer. Meanwhile for the QSR category in aggregate, consumers exposed to social media plus billboard ads were twice as likely to spend more than the average consumer; the same result was observed (for Wendy's) with social media plus TV ads.
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