Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The internet has given marketers many things, one of which is more ways to reach potential customers directly. But with this comes further challenges, most notably, how do you work out whether all that online activity is having any real impact on sales?

Tweeting, posting, uploading videos; that’s the easy part. Working out whether your efforts are having a genuine impact is often the place where lots of marketers and businesses come unstuck.

Why? Because genuinely meaningful measurement can be tricky. It’s easy to measure how many followers you have or how many likes you’ve got on your last Facebook post but that doesn’t really tell you anything.

Instagram is becoming a core platform for brands to engage with consumers since it registers consumer engagement 18 times that of Facebook and 48 times that of Twitter, according to the latest report from L2 Think Tank.

The "Intelligence Report: Social Platforms" found that the visual component of Instagram has helped the platform grow to 100 million users with the average luxury brand having 100,000 followers. Other visual platforms such as Vine, Pinterest and YouTube have grown significantly and continue to be platforms for brands to deeply engage with consumers.

"For all the mindshare that it occupies, social media ultimately drives very little ecommerce, less than 0.25 percent, and site traffic, less than 3 percent, for prestige brands," said Danielle Bailey, research lead L2 Think Tank, New York....