The study of 1,469 marketing professionals by Equation Research concluded that measurement must be part of a structured business process if a social media strategy is to be successful.

The Equation study confirmed numerous other reports in concluding that doubts over measurement remain as one of the main barriers to wider adoption of social media strategies.

Most companies were using two or three ways to measure social media efforts, the study found. The use of ‘website hits’ by 64% of brands and 62% of agencies revealed that a ‘traffic’ mentality remains dominant, but monitoring qualitative feedback and sentiment also scored highly, with 45% of brands and 39% of agencies using these measures.

“Just ‘learning the tools’ will not be effective unless the business loop is closed with proper resource allocation and measurement feedback,” the study said. “With different tools and tactics in wide use, measurement is understandably dispersed. Yet there is an acceptance that both hard and soft measures need to come to bear in order to assess success.”

The Equation study used ‘crowdsourcing’ to develop survey questions by asking professionals in the marketing industry to submit questions via blogs.