2 Proven Techniques to driving ROI from Social Business

This morning while drinking my latte, I get a call from a new prospective client there very first question “How do I track the ROI in social?” This

question resonates with all businesses & marketers as we’re always looking to see the conversions of our investments. I would agree with advertising and marketing you must be able to quantify success, and you must make

sales when you spend money. The biggest misconception is that social media is another advertising channel, which is true!

But my suggestion for anyone marketing via social is to focus 20% of your messaging on advertising/marketing and 80% of the messaging to be about

the community and the things that they care about!

When you’re investing in social business it really encompasses all aspects of your business. The biggest two areas that I think are truly untapped is social customer service/engagement, and hiring! We’ve found that as social followings grow, the social teams managing the projects seem overwhelmed. Therefore the true benefits are completely lost if you think social networking is taking a megaphone and blasting messages out to real customers without taking time to respond to them too!

I have 2 proven techniques to test that will help you focus in on the ROI of your social media campaigns.

Target Offers & Promo CodesThese are the first way to really track a social media campaign, and we’ve seen major success running Facebook Offers for a week long promotion or month long promotion. I think Facebook Offers is one of the best ways for businesses to drive gift certificates especially, and everything is traceable with this feature. The second is in combination with your website, I think the more targeted promotions the better. My opinion is that for each social platform create a different promo code, and then you can see which platforms deliver best. Also the other strategy that I’ve seen huge success is using a consistent promo code for an entire year, and it really shows the long term power of your network if branded right, and the offer must be compelling.

You will fail with social promotions, unless you offer REAL VALUE!

Social Contests & Email Follow-ups They are one of the best ways to really maximize the ROI return with your investment. We’ve seen simple contests with a prize of $500 or less leveraging 9,000+ in a month period. The ROI on this contest was of the Richters scale, and now this client is doing a targeted contest once a month for a week long blast, and we’ve leveraged over 55,000+ emails from our fan contests. The biggest core value of email addresses for a business, is the ability to drive sales for the Holidays, or on slower days you can create a promotion and offer it exclusively to your email subscribers. Just like the offers & promotions to really see major success you have to give to GET!

There are many more strategies, apps, and companies that have tools and services to help solve the ROI solution, but I would suggest starting with these simple yet very effective steps to maximizing the ROI of your social networks. If you have a question about how you should maximize your social business, I’d love to chat.

My life is truly dedicated to understand that art of social networking and it’s something that is evolving so fast, it feels like we’re always learning new ways to

connect and I would suggest that you should do the same with your social business!

Photo Credit: Netsuccesssystems.com / HRE / Strutta