Ann Arbor-based ForeSee Results Wednesday announced the creation of a new benchmark for its proprietary Social Media Value Calculation.

The Social Media Value Calculation allows ForeSee Results' clients to quantify the direct impact of their social media marketing efforts on revenue and goes far beyond traditional social media metrics such as referring URLs or raw counts of tweets and Facebook followers.

"The Social Media Value Calculation really drills down and quantifies the influence and impact that social media is having on a business, right down to the transaction level," said Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results. "The new benchmark will allow clients to see where they stand compared to others in their industry and overall."

Using data from more than 500,000 completed consumer surveys, the benchmark covers more than 150 websites across a dozen private and public sector industries, including websites for Department of Defense, Drugstore.com, General Mills, ESPN, Express, Kellogg, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Ticketmaster, Sears, and Suntrust, among others.

For the purposes of this benchmark, the term "social media" includes company-related interactions that occur on social media platforms, such as advertising by the company, messages directly from the company, and posts by friends and blogs/discussion forums.

Benchmark findings include:
* On average, 20 percent of visitors to these Web sites reported being influenced by social media, while only 1 percent came directly from a social media URL.
* Visitors influenced by social media spend an average of 40 percent more than people who were not influenced by social media. However, this varies widely by company. One retailer in the benchmark found that visitors influenced by social media spent 80 percent more; for another retailer, socially-influenced visitors spent 4 percent less.
* Visitors who were influenced by social media have higher satisfaction, higher loyalty, and greater likelihood to recommend.

"Only 1 percent of all visitors came to a Web site directly from a social media URL, but 20 percent of all visitors report being influenced by social media and 9 percent say it was their primary influence," said Maggie Kalahar, a product manager at ForeSee Results who has been working closely with the Social Media Value Calculation and the associated benchmarks. "Companies who are measuring social influence only by counting direct traffic are missing a big part of the puzzle."

"Countless organizations are working diligently to understand the effects of their social media activities, but most take a myopic view of their social efforts at the campaign or channel level," said John Lovett, senior partner at Web Analytics Demystified, a leading international web analytics consulting and strategy firm. "Organizations that assess and calculate the value of social media marketing in the context of their entire business objectives while comparing those results against a benchmark of peers will gain a much stronger perspective on performance and return on social media initiatives."

"The benchmark gives our clients a way to see whether their visitors are more or less influenced by social media than the average, which can provide a fresh perspective on directing social media investments," said Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results. "Companies have long been able to count how many Facebook fans, how many Tweets, how many complaints, and how many people click through ads on social sites, but they haven't had a way to calculate a tangible return on investment for social media efforts, not to mention other marketing initiatives. Now they can."

Read more about the Social Media Value Calculation on ForeSee Results' Web site at www.foreseeresults.com/research-white-papers/how-to-calculate-roi-on-social-media-marketing.shtml.

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