It is extremely hard to invest time and money into something when you can not see a direct return on your investment. Social media is one of these things, but just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. All too often people are caught up in thinking of ROI in the realm of a financial return, and that gets fuzzy in the social media world. Sure, you can measure the return on influence, engagement, or conversation, but at the end of the day it should just be a measure of the success for your business.
A recent study done by EMarketer shows that the three most important objectives of social media marketing done to increase ROI are: improving customer engagement, increasing website traffic, and increasing content reach. All of these objectives relate back to the bottom line of ROI, which has a direct relation to the amount of time you spend working on it. It is proven that the more and different types of content that you post, the higher your engagement levels and ROI is.
You probably notice that not many of these objectives deal with a monetary value, and that’s because that isn’t the role that social media plays. Social media is there to establish and grow your brand reach as well as customer relationships. I’m sure you have already heard that it costs more to gain a new customer than it does to keep an old one. Social media helps reach new customers while keeping old ones at the same time, so in retrospect it has to be saving you money.
If you need and want to crunch numbers from the social world to determine an ROI with a monetary value, you can. Take the amount of money (or time) you spend in one month on social media and divide it by your reach within that month. This gives you your ROI in terms of how much you are spending to gain the attention of a new customer. Improving your customer engagement, increasing website traffic, and increasing content reach will all help to increase your social ROI without directly focusing on the financial side of it. Although you can focus strictly on the return, keep in mind that social media is there to: connect, engage and build your brand image; and that is what will ultimately lead to your increase in sales.