[onemorepassword]

I have no idea about the actual value of social media, but this evidence is clearly stacking the deck:

* Search engines: how does your product become highly ranked and easily findable?

* Partner websites: ditto, how do people find those?

* Friend: how do those friends communicate about stuff like Lucidchart in 2013? This one is not even funny anymore...

* Co-worker: ditto. A lot off our conversations not directly about the work at hand happen either during lunch via social media. "Have you seen this cool app?"

* Other: seriously?

* etc..

I could go on, but social media clearly plays a major role in transferring this information. It's impossible to calculate to what extend these other channels would dry up if you would take social media out of the equation.

It's pretty much the same argument as it used to be about advertising in the pre-clickthrough era: it could not possible be measured in direct revenue. Doesn't make it worthless.

[eliza1wright]

Just to touch on one of your points, we've actually found that most people who talk about us on social media are those using or looking for free accounts. There are certainly exceptions to the rule, but the overwhelming majority are people who don't want to pay a cent for the product. We still love those people, but they don't pay the bills. And like I mentioned in the blog post, a pretty significant sample of users confirmed that most who discover us through social media are on free accounts.

Like I wrote, we won't be abandoning our social media efforts anytime soon. But we are taking another look at how much time & effort we invest in those channels.

[montanalow]

The article goes on to mention Pepsi & Coca-Cola's more rigorous experiments, with a similar finding of no value.

You're essentially asking for proof of a negative, i.e. prove that social media does not matter. This is as you stated impossible. This is also why the burden of proof is always on the person making the claim.

If companies are going to spend money on something, there should be proof that it has value.

[papsosouid]

You seem to be going on the assumption that if anyone ever gets to any website in any way then it was a result of "social media". Having people follow you on facebook does not get you in the top of search results on google/yahoo/bing. People can communicate without facebook. IM and texts still exist.