So many businesses are so keen to get in to the Social Media space that they forget they’re businesses. They become obsessed with having a fan page, recruiting followers, connecting with people and blogging that they seem to have lost sight of the fact that Social Media is just like any other expense a business has. It needs to have a positive ROI to make it worthwhile.
You can consider ROI in a number of different ways.
- Short term ROI – a sort of tactical sales push, and single promotion, an event etc.
- Long term ROI – like brand building, forging relationships, filling the sales pipeline etc.
- Cost saving – clearly not spending as much money to do the things you usually do is also a positive ROI.
But, in all these cases you must be able to quantify what the benefits are otherwise it’s all just talk.
When your marketing manager says “great, we have 10k followers on Twitter” you should be saying “so what?” to him/her – as Tom Cruise would say “Show me the money”.
Everything that your Social Media engagement does should be measurable. If it isn’t, you shouldn’t be doing it. Of course, not every single social media campaign will work, like not every traditional marketing campaign will work, but you need to know what you’re getting back for your spend – good or bad.
Often we think that Social Media is free marketing, branding and promotions…well it’s not. It has a cost like everything else you do, you’ve just moved the cost from media buying or printing over to labour, but the cost is still there – even if it is reduced.
Therefore you must apply the same analytical skills to your social media as you would to anything else otherwise you’re bound to fail.
Social Media has two killer apps up its sleeve though.
- You can absolutely measure how many people have responded to your campaign (even if they haven’t responded to you directly).
- You can engage with your audience (rather than just broadcast to them) in a very cost effective way.
However, you need to remember that there are some ground rules to make this work and if you get it wrong it won’t be pretty, but the time when you could get away without social media has now passed.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks