Social Media ROI

Social Media: Measure Results, Not Activities

in Social Media ROI

It’s easy to measure activities. When you engage with a social media expert, they might promise you, in their proposal, “10 weekly tweets” or “at least 2 daily Facebook postings” (hopefully you will NOT see the latter, as too-frequent postings on Facebook are a surefire way to get fans to UNlike your page).

But is this really what you want to measure?

A better way to measure is to take a look at your Klout score or use tools such as SocialMention.com (free) and Sprout Social (not free, but affordable). These give you an idea of how influential you are in social media. Are people listening to what you say? Are they liking, commenting, retweeting?

Even this measurement doesn’t always work, though, because it basically measures popularity, but there are scenarios where a company is using social media to connect with a select group of influencers, in which case “influence” can be low even if there IS real return on activity in the sense that contact with those influencers is maintained.

Another interesting result to measure is to look at Google Analytics and see how much traffic your main site receives through social media.

Of course, if your sales cycle is short, the best thing to measure is actual sales generated through specific, contained social media campaigns (such as promotions and contests), or even a more general “Have sales increased since we have implemented our social media campaign?” If you want to measure conversions, tools such as Argyle Social are pricey, but are the best way to help you measure actual conversions from your general social media activity, and from specific social media campaigns.

Should you track your number of Facebook fans and Twitter followers? On Facebook I would say that the number of fans is somewhat important, but on Twitter the sheer number tends to be irrelevant, since so many followers are spammers, fake accounts, or accounts that simply play the numbers game and have no real interest in your content.

Whatever you do, you should definitely define the outcomes you’re hoping to get, and then see if you can find ways to measure them, or to get close.

But always measure outcomes – not activities.

Measuring the ROI of a Social Media Campaign

in Social Media ROI

Many social media campaigns are very exciting, and many will provide you with a return on your investment that can’t really be measured with dollars and cents, such as enhancing your brand image or getting the word out there about your product.

But sometimes, you can and should try to estimate the benefits of a social media campaign before giving it the green light, and in fact, whenever you CAN measure with dollars and cents, you should.

Example. I talked with one of my B2C clients about running a contest on their blog. The goal was to get more Facebook fans, so we talked about requiring Facebook fandom as a condition for entering the contest. The cost of the contest for my client: the cost of the prize, the cost of shipping, and the cost of my time running the whole thing, and billing my client.

I wanted to present my client with exact (well, as exact as possible) numbers that would help them decide if the expense was worthwhile. So I did some research, and found that there are several opinions out there about how much on average, in annual dollars, a Facebook fan is “worth.” Everyone agrees that facebook fans are valuable, but some sources have tried to actually place a dollar value on a Facebook fan.

The number $3.60 has been tossed around in the media quite a lot lately, although some object and say it’s inaccurate, at best. Let’s say I am willing to accept that $3.60 is inaccurate since it’s based on 2 daily Facebook postings, which would annoy most fans. I usually post 1 weekday Facebook posting for my clients, so am willing to assume that the number is half of $3.60, and to be even more conservative, let’s assume it’s just $1 per fan per year.

Now we can do the math. For most small businesses, a blog contest will probably generate a couple hundred new Facebook fans. Which means that in order to return the investment within the first year, the contest cannot cost more than $200. Of course, these contests do cost more than $200. This is where you can tell yourself “Well, it’s just not worth it” (totally legitimate), or you can assume those fans will stay on board for more than one year and will refer new fans. In addition, you can assume that there IS a return here in terms of the brand image and reputation that is beyond immediate dollars and cents.

The conclusion? A social media consultant can present their client with a conservative estimate about the ROI for a single social media campaign. The immediate raw numbers will not always support running the campaign, but in my opinion, for most small businesses, the larger-picture benefits of enhancing brand recognition and of gaining new, loyal Facebook fans do justify running at least one big promotion per year.

Twitter for Lead Generation

The more I use social media for marketing, the more I find that more than anything else, social media works for branding. Social media enables us to create or strengthen an image, to establish a brand as a pioneer, as a thought-leader, or simply as a very cool brand that people genuinely want to follow and interact with.

Social media is also great when it comes to building loyalty and retaining customers, turning them into fans and ambassador for your product.

When it comes to lead generation, the connection between using social media and getting leads is not that clear, and the connection between social media and growth in sales or revenue is even less clear.

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Does Social Media Work for Demand Generation?

You’ve decided to go ahead and add a blog to your company’s website. You also started a Twitter account and a Facebook page, and have hired a social media consultant to manage those for you. Or perhaps you have hired a full-time social media manager.

If you’re like most companies, you’ve done all that hoping that your social media efforts would serve as a lead generation tool. However, most companies – at least those cited in the survey – report that this is not always the case.

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How to Eliminate Social Media Waste

Social media is a powerful tool, but it also has the potential of wasting so much of your time that it’s not really worthwhile. Getting traffic and leads is great, but to determine your ROI, you need to ask yourself how much time you’ve spent on the activities that have generated those leads. Social media is vibrant and addictive. It’s very easy to get sucked into wasting precious time on Twitter or on Facebook. Here are a few tips for avoiding social media waste:

(If you use social media for fun and leisure, please don’t read this article).

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So, Do You See Any Results Yet?

“How is Twitter going for us? Do you see any results?” The client asked me. Now, this is a fair question to ask – but we’ve only just started our social media campaign. To be exact, we started it two months ago.

This is a common scenario and it is best addressed at the beginning of the relationship. There are two main issues that need to be addressed with clients.

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Social Media ROI: Real Life Examples

Everyone likes to say how difficult it is to measure social media ROI, how social media is about conversations and long-term relationship building and so cannot be measured and quantified, especially since it takes so long to build social media relationships (just as it takes a long time to build trust in real life). It’s [...]

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Social Media is a Process

I was nodding my head enthusiastically as I was reading Seth Godin’s simple yet brilliant observation that companies have a hard time with social media because it’s a lengthy process rather than a short, well-defined event. No doubt, events are easier to manage because the time lapse between the event (a conference) and the results [...]

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Social Media ROI

Can you measure social media ROI? What are the success criteria for your social media efforts? And if you can’t measure success, aren’t you wasting your time engaging in social media? These are the most important questions your social media expert needs to answer before you hire her. Surprisingly, many social media marketers dislike the [...]

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