Social media marketing and ROI

One question many people ask when jumping onto the social media bandwagon to promote their services and products is regarding social media and ROI: “What ROI will I be getting from social media?”. Social media marketing is still very new and it is not an activity that represents immediate clear benefits and results, and it is most likely the hardest area to measure ROI for.
It is very important to know how to interpret all the various social media metrics, and to understand that social media doesn’t offer instant results nor is it a quick way to market your business online.

Social media supports other marketing initiatives

Social media marketing should never be done as a stand alone campaign and it should always support your other marketing initiatives.  There is a set of defined parameters with social media that you can use to measure your ROI and it is not an activity that can exist on its own. This is because social media can really be beneficial when working alongside other activities such as offline marketing, digital marketing, public relations, and advertising. The overall results when social media works together with other marketing campaigns is that they can be influenced by social activity. This is where most people gets confused.
Social media marketing is not a once of campaign where you can launch your initiative and be done. Your campaign might run for months, and after a couple of weeks you might have increased your followers and the number of new customers. Most people will consider this a way to measure the success of the campaign, but here is the harsh reality; social media should be ongoing.

Social media is about building trust

Social media is not just about bringing in new customers to your business, it’s about building trust between you and your clients and at the same time, increase your online reputation. As social media is a continuous activity, most people feel that this has a very low ROI, but in fact it has a much higher return than they realize. Many businesses makes this mistake because social media measurement doesn’t present black and white results.
ROI with social media is still not 100% clear, but it is very important that you understand the true benefits of running a social media marketing campaign together with your other marketing methods.


Posted by Anton
http://www.antonkoekemoer.com