How Do You Measure Effectiveness Of Social Media?

In order to get faster results from an investment in Social Media Marketing you need to measure your Social Networking efforts in terms of Return On Investment (ROI).

Five proven ways to increase your ROI are:

1. Have a Business Strategy to increase exposure in support of your products and services and to create new business.
2. Establish presence in your marketplace and reinforce your credibility.
3. Expand your reach and create buzz for events you’re hosting.
4. Nurture relationships and create strategic partnerships.
5. Properly maintain your presence and be an industry leader.

What ROI categories do you use?

Once you have a Social Media Marketing strategy in place in support of your Business Strategy, the following ROI categories can be used to measure return on investment to create branded online community:

Customer Communities:

• Increase in customer acquisition
• Increase in customer retention
• Reduction in customer service costs
• Increase in page rank and general site traffic due to additional content on a community
• Improved product and service allocation based on real time customer feedback and customer driven innovation

Internal Communities (Employees):

• Increase in productivity due to
  • General knowledge sharing
  • Identification of subject matter experts to shorten ramp up
  • Virtual team environments for distributed teams
  • Increase in employee retention. People like meeting other employees, face to face and virtually. This produces a more enriching work environment.
  • Decreased hiring costs. It’s easier to hire from within. Finding good candidates through internal social networks can provide even more information (both profile based and content creation based) about internal candidates.

This is an extract from my free Social Media Marketing Report.

If you’re interested in related social media articles, read here and please feel free to leave any comments.