Last month we looked at a promising study that demonstrated how social-savvy businesses were seeing “four times greater business impact” than their less socially engaged peers. That finding masked one not-so-rosy issue that continues to hold back further take-up and investment in social: the difficulty of measuring its ROI. A new piece of research drills down into the UK and finds companies having increasing difficulty calibrating just how far their social investment is going.The latest piece of research on this matter out this week from EPiServer says just one in ten UK businesses is able to confidently measure the return on its social media investment with any level of accuracy. Worse still, marketers are finding that they need to spend more of their time managing (and measuring) social media.

Here are the key figures of the survey, which was conducted with 250 UK-based marketing specialists:

• 90% of UK businesses failing to effectively measure social media ROI
• Over half of UK companies have increased the amount of time dedicated to managing social media this year, with 20% expecting it to increase further in the next twelve months
• 17% reported intent to set up more social media channels in the coming year

So, you can see it’s a mixed picture. The enthusiasm for social hasn’t waned. If anything, with the rise of Google+ and Pinterest in the past year, the level of commitment to multi-channel social media marketing and communications remain strong. While you’d expect time commitment would ratchet up alongside this phenomenon, you’d imagine that already time-strapped managers may be putting off the full investment until they are properly staffed.