Measuring ROI for Social Media is a real challenge. Various factors that follow the following ROI equation:

ROI= [(Amount Gained from Investment – Cost of Investment)/Cost of Investment] x 100

Business Social engagement, the process of engaging users to convert them to customers involves numerous activities, including befriending, following, liking various social channels, including posting, comments, emails, invitations, etc. It is hard to quantify all these aspects of social media over a large breadth of social channels (facebook, twitter, youtube, flicker, etc). Facebook has a useful tool to help you quantify your business page’s impact in this social circle called insights (http://www.facebook.com/insights/?sk=po_)

There are many variable that can effect the performance of any online marketing campaign, including social media ones. Having a solid website with good traffic (good content and SEO), easy to use navigation (good usability and low bounce rates), web forms (with tracking and easy to use/fill out), and other basic web aspects.

There are specific things your can do to help your quantification, which is simply applying advanced SEO practices applied to specific social channels. Choose a social channel, like twitter, decide on what message/theme/promotion your are going to use this channel for and create a specific landing page catered to this message and a conversion goal (acquire an email, sell a product/service, subscribe to a blog, etc). Every time you tweet your a variation of your message, include the landing page’s URL (usually in shortened form). Track the traffic going to this specific URL and the resultant page (thank you page, etc). There are several free tools to do this, Google Analytics is one. Plan and run this campaign for an extended period (2 to 4 weeks at least) to get enough data on it’s performance. Granted, you have to have a good flow of traffic going to your channels for this to be effective. Measure and quantify the conversions compared to your time creating the tweet messages, landing page, and other setup costs, then apply these numbers into your ROI equation. One of our recent clients had this ROI for a similar facebook campaign WebPaws.com ran for them (includes messages, landing page and analytics):

ROI = [($7,350 – $2,000)/$2,000] x 100 = 276%

What is gained by implementing a social media campaign? Using the big picture, look at increased sales, customers, visits, brand recognition, quotes, opportunity creation, new customers, etc. as what may have been gained. These can be measured indirectly by setting up a timeline of one or several metrics (revenue, new customers, visitors, etc) from the time you started to use social media in your marketing efforts; include several months prior and several months after your social media implementation. Then map onto this timeline the various social media activities in which you’ve been participating, as well as the results that your company has experienced since implementing its social media strategy. This will show the overall impact social media has had, and whether or not it has helped you increase your goals over the baseline. Contact WebPaws.com for more help or information on getting your social media channels working for your business.

ROI in Social Media

The ROI of Social Media is a post from: WebPaws.com

Savvy Businesses create and use facebook pages and twitter accounts to capitalize on the momentum and to keep their company’s presence current.  Social Networking has grown exponentially over the past 5 years.  What can your business do to help increase your customers?  WebPaws.com’s recommends the following Internet Marketing tip:  follow the 3 tasks below, in order to initiate your social media and capitalize on your business’ social marketing.

1. Create professional accounts with at least facebook and twitter (depending on your customers demographics), populate the pages with good content and keep it current.

2. Engage your followers, friends, visitors with useful tools, specialized knowledge of your business and follow up with all request.

Social Mobile Ad Gets Results

3 Steps to Making Social Media Work for Your Business is a post from: WebPaws.com

You have a web presence, but it is not providing the activity you expected? This article assumes you have created or have a website that is made to W3C standards, has good semantic structuring, built in on-site SEO and the content is relevant, unique and useful to the page and site as a whole. We are also assuming that you have an easy way for a visitor to give you their information or place an order. With all these features, designs, functionalities in place, then not getting the activity you expected is dependent on your network reach. Adding social media to your site, having external social sites, such as twitter and facebook are crucial to reaching out and being accepted into the social community. Depending on your business, having a flicker account (images) and youtube account (videos) may help in propagating your message and presence to the internet community.

Your standard web presence is just not enough. You need to have a social presence that makes sense to your business. Creating and integrating these sites together will help accomplish broadening your reach and increasing your overall web presence. Maintaining these networks can be tedious, time consuming and repetitive. This is where planning comes to play, you can tie several sites together, your WordPress, LinkedIn and facebook accounts can create twitter tweets for activity or posts and vice-versa. Feedback loops and careful integration make it fun to traverse the social web.

WebPaws.com has plans to maintain your social accounts, add relevant content with backlinks and promotions or offers to entice your various social audiences to look at your main site or other social sites. We also provide interaction services, interacting with your friends, responding to requests and opening relevant and synergistic dialogs to provide grounds of attracting the right kind of followers. Followers that end up as customers or clients.

Call or email us for more info on managing your social networks or integrating social media into your mainstream website to broaden your reach and appeal to your customers/clients.

Maintaining Your Web Presence is a post from: WebPaws.com

SEO Lesson 5 – Social Media is a post from: WebPaws.com

Top Social Media Websites

The below list represents the top 25 Social Media Websites in the world sorted by Alexa ranking which roughly represents the popularity of website for the last quarter of 2009. Google PageRank is also listed for weighting of popularity.

Top 25 Social Media Websites is a post from: WebPaws.com