Social Media ROI

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ROI on Social media – it’s a buzz word, the buzzword du jour for those getting started with social media marketing, but what does it really mean? The reality is, there is no universal definition. Like email marketing strategies , where some marketers measure their ROI by opens or clicks, while others look at revenues or click-to-open ratio, social media marketing ROI also does not mean the same thing to everyone.

I would recommend starting to explore social media ROI using a goal-based approach. Start with the goal in mind. For example, if your goal is to acquire more contacts on your social networks in an effort to build awareness and educate potential customers, then you might measure the number of Facebook fans or the number of Twitter followers you have. Alternatively, if your goal is to drive traffic to your website, you may want to measure the impact of social media on your site traffic rather than by how many followers you have on Facebook.

In an effort to help us better understand our customers’ social media goals, we surveyed 400 customers, asking them, what are the potential benefits of social media marketing?

The top 3 goals listed were pretty clear:

  • Strengthening brand
  • Generating sales
  • Acquiring contacts

With each of these goals, there are several types of metrics you can use to measure your progress and adjust your marketing to drive better results. For example, if your goal is to strengthen your brand, you can dive into how your social media content engages your audience by looking at retweets or likes. Keeping the goal in mind is critical to helping you better understand the impact of your marketing initiatives.

Regardless of whether or not you are an experienced social media marketer, eventually the question of ROI will come up, and this blog post is simply a short beginning on the subject.

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