Social Media Marketing Basics: Your Return on Investment

The return that you can expect to receive from your investment of time, energy and money into social media is likely to vary tremendously. You may already be measuring, or have measured in the past, the results of your latest social media efforts. Fortunately, the best way to track your success is by looking at your bottom line. It may sound basic, but if you aren’t increasing sales, you need to change your social marketing tactics.

Social media ROI

There have been plenty of discussions about social media and it’s benefits. It’s a hot topic with many differing opinions about its effectiveness. However, as social media evolves, it is managing to meet the increasing needs of those who use it properly.

Social media is still relatively new, and often considered to be an experimental type of marketing. Here are some tips to help you effectively track your Social Media ROI:

• Listen to your clients, and use existing data to determine where it will be easiest to find new customers. The effective use of this information gives you the unique opportunity to determine how effective your presence is in the locations you have chosen, as well as the limits you have, and areas in which you can improve.

• Create a clear goal that you intend to accomplish, and plan for future expansion of that goal.

• Evaluate the applicable information, such as leads and keyword ranking.

• Complete the necessary work to achieve that goal.

• Look back at what you have accomplished and re-evaluate your goals, using all of the information available to you.

• Repeat the process as necessary, and after re-evaluating all of the pertinent information

Social media return on investment can be validated in many different ways. Specifically, these would include:

• Brand awareness and loyalty

• Passion

• Trust and faith

• Loyalty

• Interaction

• Feedback

• Sales

• New Leads

• Qualified subscribers

However, it is easy to see that some of those aspects will be difficult to prove with traditional marketing tools, and would not by themselves, be sufficient to warrant additional investments. Therefore, it is important to remember that in this type of marketing, those rules cannot be applied. It is not simply about attracting followers, it is also about determining what is considered to be successful for this product. Most of the time, success is proven in revenue.

Whether you wish to attract a new client base, increase sales, improve on the existing relationship with current customers, or in some other way quantify your success, social media marketing tools can help you get there.

Each venue that you choose as a new marketing tool (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook), will  be effective in its own, unique way, and you cannot expect identical responses. It is always a good idea to periodically reevaluate your business plan, and to always allow for improvement. As social media continues to expand, there will always be new ways to improve upon your process.