Taking stock of social media (of magazines)

emedia/vitals reporting: People magazine recently eclipsed 4 million followers on Twitter. Vogue has 3.1 million Facebook fans. The big numbers underscore the progress magazine publishers have made establishing a strong social media presence. But the question remains, what impact do these followers have on the business?
Measuring social ROI continues to be a challenge for media companies and marketers alike. Some say it’s a fool’s errand to even try to formulate an ROI metric for social media.
“Keep dreaming,” Unmetric CEO Lakshmanan Narayan wrote in a guest post for Forbes about the folly of brands (not publishers specifically) attempting to pinpoint social media ROI. He adds:

In terms of social media today, we often hear questions like “what is the monetary value of a fan?” Ironic, considering that we still have not fully defined the value of a TV commercial viewer. In fact, we continue to ‘invest’ in television and other mass media advertising, notwithstanding the fact that we still don’t know which (proverbial) 50% of our budget is working.

L2 ThinkTank, in its most recent Digital IQ Index for magazines, found that only 38% of the 80 magazine brands it studied are actively monetizing a Facebook tab (for example, by referencing an advertiser), and just 35% are monetizing their tweet stream (eg, through sponsored tweets).
Although publishers haven’t yet figured out the magic ROI formula for Facebook and Twitter, not to mention emerging platforms such as Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram and Google+, they are collecting an awful lot of information about how their audience likes to engage on social media. This data can lead to insights that inform content and audience development decisions and, indirectly at least, boost revenues.
A recent MPA study of 18-to-34-year-olds sheds some light on how magazine brands are attracting Millennials into their social media communities. The study found that 56% of magazine readers who use Twitter follow a magazine brand on Twitter. For respondents who identified themselves as “avid magazine readers,” that figure jumps to 69%. Two-thirds of avid readers said they had re-tweeted articles from a magazine’s feed.
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