Social Media - Return On Investment (ROI)

When you talk about implementing Social Media into your Marketing and Communication Strategy. Company's always think: What do I get back when I invest in Social Media/ What is the ROI of Social Media?

First things first: Social Media is (almost) free of charge. You will need a web-care team who is in charge of "knowing" what's been said about the company and (if necessary) will respond to these discussions. But look at ROI on Social Media this way:

Based on your objectives, what are you measuring?

• Leads/sales – Landing pages/clicks to conversion
• Relationships – Continue the relationship/loyal customer
• Membership/registration – Long term commitment to learning
• Conversations – Sentiment/research/trending topics
• Perception – Image/reputation/survey responses
• Calls to action – Tweet/retweet/blog/share information
• Engagement – Participate in an event community
• Education – Discuss level of learning/survey responses
• Authority/thought leadership – Follow/comment/links
• Traffic – Drive traffic to website to further engage

Source: Deirdre Breakenridge: The Value of Social Engagement for the 21st Century Business

Where the “I” in ROI represents investment:

• Return on Engagement:
  The duration of time spent either in conversation or interacting, and in turn, what transpired that’s worthy of measurement.

• Return on Participation:
  The metric tied to measuring and valuing the time spent participating in social media through conversations or the creation of social objects.

• Return on Involvement:
  Similar to participation, marketers explored touch points for documenting states of interaction and tied metrics and potential return of each.

• Return on Attention:
  In the attention economy, we assess the means to seize attention, hold it, and measure the response.

• Return on Trust:
  A variant on measuring customer loyalty and the likelihood for referrals, a trust barometer establishes the state of trust earned in social media engagement and the prospect of generating advocacy and how it impacts future business.

Source: Brian Solis: The Maturation of ROI