Calculate the ROI of Social Media

The greatest social media platforms can generate a return even higher than a TV Commercial. Fan pages, Facebook and Twitter accounts present the opportunities for staff to speak to visitors, strangers to introduce themselves and friends to communicate.

Campaigners raise brand awareness and whilst some followers will listen, messages aren’t usually passed on. However, studies show that bloggers and readers who engage often meet face to face and some users may also share branded content with friends.

Once the shop has closed, a retailer measures their ROI through the number of sales they have made. This can also be done by the social marketer. There are five elements involved in determining the commercial success of social media:

** Number – Count the number of ‘’Likes’’, the number of downloads and the number of views.

** Time – Tweets, retweets and comments take time and lead to other friends taking time to digest them too.

** Trust – The strength of digital communications amongst consumers to judge their closeness. A good way to quantify this on Facebook is the comment-to-like ratios of fan posts: the greater the ratio the more intimate friends shared the brand experience.

** Sentiment – Filter through comments and look out for specific words.

** Income – Know the demographics of followers.

To read about measuring the ROI of social media in more detail, visit http://www.briansolis.com/2012/10/calculate-the-roi-of-social-media/