rebeccadenison Yes, and yes. Social marketing is still in its very early stages--we have so much data yet to collect. Conversational impact on conversion is definitely an interesting one. As to ROI of curating vs. creating, you make a really good point--it's cheaper and easier to curate. We don't collect cost data within Argyle so I don't have it in my dataset, but this definitely warrants consideration when building a social marketing plan.
jonharules Hm! Good point.
Vicki - Glad you liked it :) One thing I didn't get into detail in the writeup of the research was that the 150,000 posts that I analyzed were only *posts with links*. So, conversational posts that didn't include links to content were completely left out, and conversational posts with links were treated just like any other post.
Analysis of conversational styles--how often a company replies to its followers--would definitely be something that's interesting to look at. Maybe in the future... :)
R, N, E: Thanks for the comments! Really glad you found the research valuable.