Most marketers can't measure the ROI of social commerce - can you?

With 90% of purchases subject to some sort of social influence, it’s no surprise that social commerce is a top priority for businesses both now and heading into the new year. However, a new survey of marketers from Marketing Magazine reveals that the majority are missing out on the full potential of social commerce.

Just over half of marketers say they only understand “a little” about social commerce despite its revenues being tipped to rocket from £5 billion today to £30 billion in 2015. 61% of those surveyed consider their businesses to still be in the early days of experimenting with social commerce.

One obstacle to more extensive use of social commerce seems to be that marketers are still struggling to tie social commerce to their bottom lines. The most popular social KPI is the number of fans or followers. While Facebook and Twitter are important parts of the social commerce revolution, they’re certainly not the whole story, and it’s notoriously hard to measure the impact of growing a community in hard business benefits.

A staggering 22% of marketers fail to measure the return on their investment in social commerce in any way at all, and only around a third are able to tie the impact of social commerce tools to increased sales or revenues.

Although many are clearly struggling to determine how the benefits of social commerce can be measured, there are many ways in which this can be done - and many benefits it offers, according to the marketers surveyed:

We pride ourselves on being able to show our clients a measurable impact on their sales, order values and consumer loyalty from our social commerce solutions – and our Reevoo Analytics dashboard puts all that data in our partners hands, so they can see for themselves.

Already 2012 is being marked as a vital year in social commerce – those slow to engage because they’re unable to measure impact risk losing significant revenue.

Find out more about the trends in social commerce usage, and benchmark against your peers with the full Marketing Magazine Social Commerce in 2012 report.