From Twitter to Facebook via YouTube or Foursquare, the use of media and social networks seems to be the most important marketing concept currently. However, the big question that companies ask themselves is they really good for something? Are social networks effective?

The brands are making a great effort to position themselves in social networks, something that makes sense considering the number of users and their audience. However, the main problem facing many companies is of course the lack of resources and money to implement their strategies and perform an analysis and monitoring to find out if their campaigns are really effective and profitable, something that at the moment seems can not be calculated in an easy way or as simple as a priori it might seem

According to data from a recent study developed by the company Pagemondo, 63% of companies say that marketing in social networks is a tactic that promises and will generate benefits. Of course, they would not play everything in them either, they all show a rather more cautious character. 20% of them have more faith in that potential while 6% are very skeptical in this regard.

Regarding the way of measuring the benefits and the return on investment of this type of strategy, the majority affirms that it does so by taking as an indicator the number of fans or followers, “recommendations (Likes, RTs)”, number of shared contents , leads generated through these actions, or the increase in sales that, in theory, are generated as a result of said actions.

The truth is that both experimentation and trial, trial and error in each of them can be a way to find out whether or not they can offer us the desired results. The following infographic gives us some valuable information about how companies that place their hope in this type of media as a marketing tool seek ways to maximize their efforts and how they are achieving better results.