Social Media Marketing Measuring ROI - Direct Financial vs. Indirect Financial

Measuring ROI on your Social Media Marketing initiatives largely depends on your goals. Social Media Marketing has a number of benefits that are both directly financial and indirectly financial.

Companies are using Social Media in many different facets of their organizations that include human resources, corporate communications, marketing, sales and business development.

Human Resources can take advantage of recruitment tools like LinkedIn Jobs and instantly search and access excellent candidates. Job postings can also be advertised in an organizations group or corporate page. FREE online classifieds like Kijiji are another great place to post job opportunities. Most sites offer premium services where you can accelerate your job postings position or coverage and these services are usually pitons compared to thousands of dollars for Workopolis memberships and employment agencies cost. ROI in this regard is usually measured by recruitment cost savings and quality of talent acquired through Social Media initiatives.

Corporate Communications departments have leveraged Social Media to extend their reach. Whether Social Media is being used to increase employee engagement or to send out news and updates about the organization, Social Media Marketing creates new and more affordable channels to communicate (and on mass if required). In this regard organizations can save on "large conventional media" to get their word out because leveraging Social Media Marketing sites like Facebook or LinkedIn have much larger audiences than the most popular television networks. The effect of this type of Social Media is largely long term and ROI is measured by cost-savings, through polling employees, customers and the public (depending on your goal) about their feelings since engaging them through Social Media Networks.

Marketing Departments use Social Media Marketing to increase online brand awareness, support other advertising initiatives, drive new sales (through targeted promotions), increase presence/exposure on the search engines, promote events, build a base of fans/followers to soft market to in the future. ROI in this regard is both short-term and long-term, direct and indirect financial. ROI can be measured by considering a number of factors but again, it largely depends on your brand, target, focus, effort and goals.

1. Review analytics on your Social Media Presences to see: a. Which content generate more traffic (interest)? b. Which sites are performing better?

2. Has general traffic to your site increased?

3. Have new sales overall increased?

If results are dismal, consider asking yourself a number of questions:

• How targeted is your campaign and message? Social Media Marketing is a tool and before using it you should already have a strategy.

• Are you releasing an adequate amount of written and video content?

• Do you have an email prospect list or have you announced your campaign to your clients, employees and prospects?

• Have you announced the campaign within the organization to get employee buy in? Never underestimate the power of your team.

• Are you posting updates to your campaign too frequently, turning off followers?

• Are you not posting frequently enough to make an impact?

Social Media Marketing is significantly less expensive and bears less risk than big ticket advertising, when testing the market place.

Sales and Business Development Teams use professional Social Media Marketing sites like LinkedIn and Plaxo to take professional networking to another level. Organizations are able to measure direct financial ROI with ease because team members can directly report back new sales driven through professional networking on Social Media. Other direct financial Social Media ROI can be measured through cost-savings achieved through reduced expenses incurred from direct sales methods that involve travel, cost to attend networking events, in-person presentations and more.

Social Media Marketing is a commitment and organizations cannot avoid it because they are focused on measuring direct dollars and cents alone. One has to dig deeper to discover the reasons why the largest Fortune 500 companies have integrated Social Media into every facet of their organizations reaping significant ROI through increased sales, online exposure and cost savings, company-wide. For more information about Marketing Measuring ROI on Social Media Marketing visit www.assureassess.com/socialmedia.