Being an outsourcing company ourselves, we once considered to outsource our social media marketing activities.

While, by experience, we very well knew how difficult it was to convey the ‘potential value’ of something that is not tangible, we had to ask the potential companies the inevitable question of how we were going to be able to measure the success of social media marketing efforts. Not to our surprise, we could not get a clear answer to our question other than we were going to be able to monitor the performance based on statistical data. Yes, there were many tools and dashboard applications showing counts of likes, hits, clicks, and so forth, but what counted at the end of the day was the return on investment on social media marketing, which could be almost impossible to count depending on the industry and revenue model of your company.

The correct answer we ourselves later on found to our question was the following: “Not everything that can be counted counts, and everything that counts can be counted!”