You pay for print advertising per millimetre, centimetre or page and measure the power of PR by millimetre. So just how do we measure social media? Get me my ruler; I want to measure your social media!

It’s absurd but then again so is the debate between the value of traditional media and social media. I read the news online but I like my ‘chick’ magazines to page through when I’m lounging on the couch. The point I’m trying to make is that I believe both are valuable, but different, mediums of communication.

In order to understand the value of social media, we need to start with the psychology of traditional advertising.

The costs of print ads are usually worked on readership numbers and with a little ‘guess-estimation’ you can come up with an advertising or PR value. What print publications cannot tell you is exactly how many people read the advertorial, how many appreciated the beauty of the stylishly designed advert or gained a better perception of your business which made them rush out and buy your product. However it’s still a valuable medium because people that buy magazines tend to keep them and/or share them.

So if advertisers can’t give you exact statistics why is advertising such a booming business?
Well for one thing advertising is not just about straight and simple sales conversions. Not everyone who sees your advert or PR will buy your product and you know that. What advertising and PR can do is make your brand known to more people. If the advertising and/or PR is good, it will get people talking. Slowly but surely your brand is recognised, innovators try it out and if the product and the customer service is what it should be, these brand mavens start telling their friends. Advertising is a way to stimulate the all powerful word of mouth.

So how is social media different?
While print publications can’t say for definite if their readers paid any attention to your advert or flipped passed it, you can find out which blog posts got the most readers, how many people joined your fan page and get feedback on what they think.

That’s one bonus of social media but the real reason why so many companies are adjusting their marketing strategy to include online advertising and social media is simply because they’re going where the people are going. This month  South African Internet users passed the 5-million mark. The internet user base grew by 15% last year, from 4, 6-million to 5, 3-million and it’s going to keep growing.

It’s an expectation that once a social media profile is built, the crowds will flock to it. As wonderful as that sounds, it is unfortunately a myth. Social media takes time. Just because you’ve started a blog, Facebook fan page and you’re tweeting up a storm, doesn’t mean customers are going to be camping outside your head office and your product will be flying off the shelf.

“Digital Marketing is about being slow,” writes Mitch Joel, the digital visionary Google invited to explain online marketing to some of the world’s top brands, in his blog post ‘In Praise Of Slow.’
“You can’t quickly start a blog and get results. It takes time to build your content, find you voice, develop a community and earn trust and respect.”

But that doesn’t sound advertising?! This is something that some struggle to understand, social media is NOT advertising.

“Social media is, in many ways, the antithesis of advertising. Advertising is one-way communications aimed at large groups of consumers. Social media is two-way communications that requires listening as well as speaking,” points out social media educator, strategist and a public relations professional Jason Falls in his post ‘Advertising Agencies And Social Media: A Culture Clash‘.

This means that if a ‘social media guru’ promises you fast sales and massive results in minimal time, don’t buy into everything he or she is saying. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Social media is just one channel of communication to reach out to your target audience, attract fresh interest and build your brand. It takes time to build a community, listen to the needs of the members (adjusting the strategy accordingly), research and write content that will be appreciated by this growing community. It’s a process of daily adjustment and engagement.

As someone that spends most of my workday doing this just this, I can say that sometimes it can seem painfully slow. However my spirits were recently lifted when I met a friend for coffee. She told me how she joined “this fan page” (one I happen to manage… shhh) and raved about our client’s high-end product. She practically sold it to me! And that, an unmeasured conversation, the things people talk about spending their hard earned money on, is worth more than any statistic.

Read more of Monique‘s blog posts here.

You may also like these posts: