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Nov17

ROI from Social Media

There is a lot of debates online about the measurability of social media. I personally believe that social media is much easier to measure than traditional media. There is a large amount of qualitative data gained from online metrics but there is also quantitative data that is easy to measure. For instance. Since I started my own blog I’ve kept track of my hard costs over the past ten months. It amounts to $904, primarily paying for an email management service.

This is what I’ve been able to measure:

  • Blog traffic = 27,907
  • Number of comments = 164
  • Number of RSS subscribers = 190
  • Number of email newsletter subscribers = 1,142
  • Number of inbound links =
  • New clients generated = 7

There are quite a few things that can be measured from the use of social media, far more than can be measured from traditional media campaigns. I’m not taking into account my time and I admit, social media is time intensive. But if you want to capture time it is easy to do. If you are developing and initiating social media campaigns on behalf of your clients, you will primarily be billing for your agency’s time. Most of the social media tools are very inexpensive if not free. It is just labor intensive.

I currently have 188 blog posts published, six scheduled and 49 drafts that I’m working on. I have a lot of my time invested. There was a discussion on Twitter the other day about a blog that sold for $96,000. I was asked if I would sell my blog for that kind of money. The more I thought about it the more I realized that I wouldn’t. The business my blog has generated this past year exceeds that figure and the potential to do better is even greater. The ROI from social media is beyond any media I have ever used in my entire advertising career. It doesn’t even begin to touch on the personal enrichment that I have gained from it. No single thing has enhanced my professional life more than social media. Plus it is the best marketing tool I have ever used.

Michael Gass - Guest Blogger
Birmingham, Al - Michael Gass has worked with marketing communications firms for over a decade. He helps them to create a more clearly defined focus and differentiating business strategy that will give them a competitive advantage for new business, a higher-profile reputation, and an improved ability to attract and win the clients they really want. Michael is a social media evangelist. He believes that there has been a major shift in the way agencies acquire new business. Instead of pursuing new business, it is more important to properly position an agency online for it to be found by its best prospects by enlarging an agency’s online footprint. Prospective clients will even initiate the contact and when they do they are ready to do business.

www.fuelingnewbusiness.com

posted in: opinion

This post was published on Monday, November 17, 2008 at 3:30 pm

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Comments

1

Guest Post: Social Media ROI « FUEL LINES

November 17, 2008 at 5:54 pm

[...] Guest Post: Social Media ROI George Morris, Client Services Manager at Imulus, a web design and marketing solutions company, in the Denver/Boulder region, was kind enough to ask me to write a guest blog post on ROI and Social Media. George and I became acquainted through Twitter. I appreciate his invitation and you can read my article on their blog site imulus/insights.  [...]

2

Norman Wright

November 18, 2008 at 6:53 am

Very good post.

3

john paul strong

November 18, 2008 at 8:04 am

Has anyone or is anyone successfully operating blogging campaigns and social network sites for retail operations. Autootive dealerships are the main concern of mine and why we have started some social networking throught the dealerships, the traffic and interest levels to them are not that great.

Any Comments?

4

George

November 18, 2008 at 8:46 am

Hello John Paul

I would honestly recommend contacting Dave Taylor he is a leader in the blogosphere and he is good on answering blog related questions.

5

David Fabbri

November 20, 2008 at 5:47 am

You make a good case for companies in this business spending time working in the social media space to promote themselves.

Another important point for many small agencies is that they lack basic experience with social media. It’s hard to sell a client on using something you don’t really understand. Immersing yourself in the space can help you take what you already know about marketing and direct response techniques and motivating people etc. and start to give you a more intuitive feel for how those things apply (or don’t) in social media. This is especially true with “older” staff that have great marketing insights and intuition but feel lost in the interactive space. It’s not rocket science - the sooner you get out there and start doing it, the sooner you’ll be an expert.

One thing I hadn’t really thought about was your comment that the increased measurability of online endeavors makes the resluts more measurable than many traditional avenue. I think the key is setting the right expectation with clients and setting reasonable, measurable objectives. These will of course vary depending on the type of business they are in, product or service, length of sales cycle, complexity of the sale etc. The key is there are things that can be measured, and objectives can be set, even if these aren’t hard sales/revenue ROI numbers.

6

Chris Baggott

November 21, 2008 at 3:57 pm

Great job on tracking those metrics. Where most businesses working with social media like blogging are forgetting is to track conversions.

Understanding that the vast majority of those 27,000 visitors are first timers right?

You do a good job showing us your traffic (top of the funnel) and the 7 clients coming out the bottom. What are those new customers worth? How much is your average acquisition cost with other methods? Those 7 clients could be worth millions right?

I also like to challenge marketers to look at the call to action on their blogs. Often we forget that a company blog has the same responsibility as any other web property. Conversion is usually more important than Conversation. Think about how to get 14 new clients or 28 new clients or 56 new clients.

Thanks for sharing, this is great.

Chris Baggott
CEO
Compendium Blogware

7

Emma

November 24, 2008 at 4:11 pm

I think measuring is easier online, but it’s knowing what to do with those quantitative data that is more difficult. What is a view? How do you determine unique visitors or impressions? And who cares if someone stumbled across your page? “So what” is always the big question.

A lot of the Twitter buzz recently has been “quality over quantity” in followers. I think Chris put this in a good business-y perspective.