ROI x 2?
Social Media sounds great but where’s the Return On Investment, right? So many clients and prospects ask me how to measure your ROI. As a Social Media Specialist Virtual Assistant, the first question I always ask my clients is: What tool do you use to evaluate your ROI in general? Often times, I am surprised when they tell me they don’t use anything at all! There are many clients out there who have had a ‘static’ website for some time and no tracking tool whatsoever. Sometimes they have a tracking tool and don’t know it’s there or don’t know how to use it. The interesting thing is, that not only can you track traditional ROI for social media, there is a second ROI that is specific to Social Media, and that is a “Return on Influence”.
The tool I usually recommend for tracking the more traditional ROI is Google Analytics. This is a free offering and gives you great information with respect to the traffic that is flowing to your site, etc. You can break this information down and find the sources of this traffic which includes your social media sites. Once you know where the decent traffic is coming from, you can begin to fine tune your strategies. The same is true for your Blog if you have one. Make sure you have WordPress stats or Google Analytics installed on your WordPress site too so you can see how your blog is being received and where the traffic is coming from. You can get some very valuable information from this data. Please note however, that Google Analytics is only available as a plugin on WordPress.org (WordPress’ self hosted option) not WordPress.com
The second ROI is Return On Influence. This is something that is easily visible from your interactions with your friends, fans and followers on Social Media and while this is a more subtle indication of your success in the SM realm, it is a valuable one nonetheless.. Here’s how it works.
The whole purpose of getting involved in Social Media in the first place is to build relationships. By building that trust and intimacy with your prospects and clients, you are further cementing your relationship with them which opens the door to doing business. In building your presence in that environment, you should be looking to showcase your expertise and try to become known as the person people think of when they think of your product or service. By becoming that ‘go to’ person, you begin to establish an influence in the marketplace, hence this ROI.
Once you begin to establish your presence on the social media sites (and this does take some time), you can begin to evaluate your ROInfluence. Look at things like the number of strategic contacts you are building into your SM community. Take a look too, at the number of fans that you are gaining on sites like Facebook. Is the fan base growing? What about Twitter? Is the number of followers in your target market growing? How about the conversation level. Are you engaging people and are they interacting with you? If the answer is yes to these questions, then you are beginning to take your place in your community and helping pave the way to doing business. People do business with people they trust.
Everything counts. In the big picture everything you do contributes to your success so it’s important to evaluate all these indicators! What about you? Have you measured your success this way? I’d love to hear your comments. And here on my site, I offer comment luv!…By leaving a comment, you will be able to link back to your own site…great for SEO 
I’m looking forward to hearing from you!
While physically located in Newmarket, Ontario where Joanne lives with her family, as a VA, she is virtually yours anywhere….
