HOW TO Measure Your Social Media ROI: Part 4 (If you missed it, check out HOW TO Measure Your Social Media ROI Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)

Let’s face it, most business owners starting to utilize and leverage social media want to know what the return on investment is with social media.  Honestly, social media lacks easily and clearly measurable characteristics of other investments, but it IS very much possible to see and track the monetized return from engaging in social media.  Every person using and utilizing social media should always remember, however, that social media is most importantly about building relationships; companies that don’t understand this simple fact will likely not feel the full and complete benefits of Social Media.  So how does one actually visualize the effectiveness and ROI of social media campaigns?

Tip #5: Understand Page Rank

As your site draws in increasing traffic, it will apply more effectively to organic search engine algorithms.  Committing to specific keywords with your tweets, posts, and other public communications will help naturally raise your website and social media presence in the rankings, so paying attention to this is a solid step toward managing your ROI for social media.

Other less understood ways to get your website to grow is through interacting with other websites in your niche.  Commenting on blogs almost always provides you with an opportunity to link back to your website; blogging and commenting on blogs is a necessity for strong social media presences.  Commenting on other blogs is also a great way to identify yourself to a targeted group of people as a clear and intelligent voice on topics in your field.

HOW TO Measure Your Social Media ROI: Part 4 (If you missed it, check out HOW TO Measure Your Social Media ROI Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

Let’s face it, most business owners starting to utilize and leverage social media want to know what the return on investment is with social media.  Honestly, social media lacks easily and clearly measurable characteristics of other investments, but it IS very much possible to see and track the monetized return from engaging in social media.

Tip #4: Use 3^rd Party Tools

Honestly, there are WAY too many different tools for measuring one’s impact (which works hand-in-hand with ROI).  Since there are so many to choose from, I’ll just focus on two very important resources that business owners like you should be investigating.

oneforty.com

For most businesses, a trip to www.oneforty.com might feel intimidating at first due to the hundreds of applications (apps), tools, and resources that it has to offer.  Fear not!  This particular selection of digital treats offers user ratings and sponsored recommendations.  Most of the way down the initial web page you will see a large squared section title, “What’s Essential;” this should be your next stop on the journey of social media enlightenment.  There are 10 ‘essential’ types of resources, but ‘Analytics’ is the destination that you’re looking for; this will bring you to the top six analytical tools for your twitter account.  Read the reviews and choose what best suits your specific fancy.

Alexa

It seems like so few people actually use www.alexa.com to monitor their websites, but there’s no time to start like the present.  Alexa can install a toolbar to your web browser if you want it to; this toolbar will keep you posted as you browse the World Wide Web as to the ‘rank’ of the page that you are looking at.  Ideally, people should want this number to decrease in pursuit of the #1 position (google).  How this affects your social media ROI is by monitoring the “linking” websites that drive traffic to your website.  The higher that social media sites rate in the listing of referring sites, the better the social media campaign.  Ideally, if most of a site’s traffic is coming from social media, then success has been attained.

HOW TO Measure Your Social Media ROI: Part 3 (If you missed it, check out HOW TO Measure Your Social Media ROI Part 1 and Part 2)

Let’s face it, most business owners starting to utilize and leverage social media want to know what the return on investment is with social media.  Honestly, social media lacks easily and clearly measurable characteristics of other investments, but it IS very much possible to see and track the monetized return from engaging in social media.

Tip # 3: Use Special Promotions

If you want to know just how many people really care about your products and services, try doing some free promotional giveaways!  If you sell products online try offering a discount, free shipping, or a bonus product to customers that interact with you digitally.  During the checkout process, use a promotional code like “twitter” which provides the FREE addition to the order (or discount); this will provide information about how many people that you interact with actually want/use your products.  What could make this process even better would be to restart the process using different social mediums to track your value on each of them.

In his book, Crush It, Gary Vaynerchuk provides a wonderful case study about his marketing efforts.  He put up a billboard, purchased a TV spot, and tweeted about free shipping on purchases of wine from his company.  You’ll have to read the book to see how monumentally more successful his social media efforts were compared to more traditional means of marketing.  The best part of the whole case study is the amount that he spent compared to the return on each of them – needless to say, social media is FREE so the ROI on something that didn’t cost a penny is pretty colossal.

HOW TO Measure Your Social Media ROI: Part 2 (If you missed it, check out HOW TO Measure Your Social Media ROI Part 1)

Let’s face it, most business owners starting to utilize and leverage social media want to know what the return on investment is with social media.  Honestly, social media lacks easily and clearly measurable characteristics of other investments, but it IS very much possible to see and track the monetized return from engaging in social media.

Tip #2: Keep Track of Your Interactions

As each year brings new and innovative applications and 3^rd party tools that can interact with our online personas; measuring results is easier than it ever has been before and social media is no different.  There are several tools to measure the influence, clout, and impact of different social media platforms, but a simple spreadsheet managed by a person (rather than an automated system) goes a long way.  Keep track of every single message, @response, interaction, blog comment, and more.

Maintaining good records of how many people are interacting with your social media accounts provides manageable information that clearly shows growth.  This process also helps to clearly indicate who interacts the most – providing extra attention and gratitude to these people embodies what social media is truly about: developing and cultivating relationships.  A well developed online relationship founded in digital interactions has proven time and time again to be a successful practice in business.  Remember, social media doesn’t start overnight, but with some patience, practice and hustle you will see just how effective this investment can be.

3 Elements provides solutions for your social media needs.  Contact us to discuss how we can bring your business into the conversation.

Don’t just join the social media conversation because it is the new idea of online presence that is catching like wildfire, you need to create and maintain a business plan for online media that supports the overall marketing strategy otherwise, you are going to fail. It’s not as easy as going to Twitters homepage and creating an account, in fact that is far from the truth of the twitterverse. If your serious about integrating social media into your business plan there are a few things to think about.

To start, it’s important to reflect on if your web strategy supports your marketing strategy. If not you need to realign either/or so they complement each other nicely. Having online presence means your ultimately looking to convert viewers into customers, how are you going to use social media as a tool to do this effectively? Think about SEO, social media, usability, social networking, blogging and (our newest favorite) Adwords which are all components that should all be given the same amount of attention. You have to think big picture, which should be a balance of how your marketing plan and your social media plan mirror each other.

The biggest thing people seem to surpass is that using social media in your business marketing plan will not produce immediate results. We thrive off instant gratification and technology has enabled us to live our daily life around getting quick, fast, results but you must be patient, you must give it the opportunity to produce and measure successful results, however, at the same time you, have to be persistent and consistent (and don’t be a fail whale). Goodluck to all!

I don’t understand how it will help my business!

I am constantly hearing the above statement from almost anyone I meet at a networking event after they learn that 3 Elements is a social media company. After talking to me for 5 minutes, they get it; at least a little bit and wants to know more. So I decided to write a blog post about that statement to help others better understand how social media can help grow their business, and understand how you don’t have to spend tons of time online to make it successful.

Mari Smith explained Facebook and Twitter beautifully when she said, “They are a Relationship Management and Visibility Tool.” If you take a second to think about that, you will realize that statement didn’t include the word ‘sales’. However, when you are building and maintaining relationships and gaining exposure, what ends up happening….SALES!

Often, I think business owners create an account on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Linked In, etc., fill out their profile, connect to a few people, and then sit back and get frustrated when their traffic and sales haven’t gone up. This is because it is a tool, which has to 1. Be a part of your marketing plan, and 2. Needs to constantly be used to be effective.

Once I say, “you need to constantly be updating and using your social media accounts”, the busy business owner looks stressed and immediately says, “well there’s no way I have time for that.” But my argument is; do you have time to build relationships, gain exposure, make sales and have awesome customer service?” Of course the answer is, YES!

If the answer is no, I would suggest you stop what you are doing and close up shop because you’ll never be successful. However, if you said yes, keep reading because I’m going to give you a few tips on how to be effective on social media, but not spend tons of hours a week.

1.Learn it. (Or hire someone who knows it.) You must understand what social media is used for, how to use, and the tools to help you use it in order to be successful. If you had a manual car, but didn’t know how to drive stick, you would either stall a million times, fluid the engine (speaking from experience) or never move more than 3 feet. Why would you buy and try to drive a manual car if you didn’t know stick, and didn’t plan on learning it?

Social media, just like almost anything else, is the same way. You need to learn it to be able to make action happen online. If you don’t have the desire or time to learn it, then you need to hire someone that will learn it for you and work in house, or you need to hire a consultant or company that specializes in social media.  And this applies to pretty much any business and leads me to my next point.

2.Social media NEEDS to be a part of your Marketing Plan. If it isn’t, you are missing a huge and targeted audience that needs and wants to learn more about your company….online. Like Bob Dylan sang; Times, they are a changin’. With technology being so advanced, fast and shiny, we are more likely to sit down and pull up digg.com or NYTimes.com to find out current news versus go pick up the paper from our driveway.

We are also shopping this way. And I don’t know about you, but I go to Facebook and Twitter to ask what I should do this weekend, which movie I should watch and were I should have lunch. If someone was suggesting your restaurant to me, or your movie theater, or your event to attend, without you doing it yourself; wouldn’t that be fabulous!? A recommendation goes so much further because it is an endorsement rather than a suggestion.

Having an online presences helps put your company at top of mind when people are searching for their answers. It also puts you before your competition. Having social media in your marketing plan adds a whole other world for you to market that could double, triple or quadruple your sales, readers, subscribers, etc. Is it worth it to you yet???

3. Measure your Online Efforts. Just like all of your marketing campaigns, you need to be tracking what you are doing to see if it is effective or not. If you are spending time marketing, networking and promoting online, you need to see if it is paying off, and which site is most effective. One thing to note…social media is 70% networking, posting articles from your industry, etc., 20% promoting other people, and 10% self promotion. Only 10%! If done correctly, it won’t take too much time until you are a leader online. But if not done correctly, when you start tracking your efforts, you are not going to see the results you want.

Each month track your traffic, top referring sites, percentage of growth, forwarded URL’s, etc., via Google Analytics. If you don’t have analytics, get them immediately at google.com/analytics. It’s free to add to your site, and vital to measuring your ROI. Also, using a URL shortener like bit.ly or su.pr will store the URL’s you shorten and display how many people clicked on the URL, where they are located, and where they clicked from (twitter, email, etc.)

At the end of every month I generate a report with all of the above info and plan my next month’s sales goals, tweak my social media strategies and learn from what info was valuable and spread virally, and what didn’t.

If you have questions, or still don’t understand how social media would help your business grow, please contact us and we will help you see the light!