Is There a Need for New Marketing Communications Performance Metrics for Social Media?

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework for measuring the effectiveness of social media marketing communications. With recent advances in information and communications technology, especially in social collaboration technologies, both academics and practitioners rethink whether the existing marketing communications performance metrics are still valid in the changing communications landscape, or is it time to devise entirely new metrics for measuring marketing communications performance. The study emphasizes that marketing communications performance measurement metrics have developed towards a customer orientation. The findings further indicate that a) there is no broadly accepted opinion of a single critical performance indicator, and b) literature classifies social media marketing metrics in three groups: qualitative, quantitative and financial. The implications of the study point that the shift towards a digitized interactive marketing environment does not necessarily mean that a whole array of new measurement metrics is needed.