Tips & Best Practices

Social Media Mythbusters: 5 Myths About Social Media ROI

June 30, 2011 by Kari Rippetoe

I’ve been reading a higher-than-usual number of blog posts and articles about social media ROI – how to measure it, what to measure, what not to measure. I’m not sure if there was some sort of collective epiphany that led to this all of a sudden (or I just have ROI on the brain), but many of these posts have given me some food for thought about the topic – so I decided to write my own post.

As you read through the many articles floating around out there, here are some of the myths I’ve discovered about social media ROI to help give you a little bit of perspective:

ROI can’t be measured for social media marketing. Sorry, but marketers can no longer fall back on this excuse. When social media first started gaining momentum as a potentially viable marketing channel, no one was quite sure yet about how to measure efforts. Because it was a very young medium, there was a gap in terms of knowledge and tools to help us do this. Now that social media has really come into its own as a marketing channel, our collective knowledge about it has grown and more tools have become available to track a variety of metrics, including ROI.
The only return that matters in social media is Return on Engagement (ROE). I remember a couple of years ago when “Return on Engagement” was being touted as the “new ROI” for social media. I like to say that social media is all about being social, and “engagement” is one of those buzz words we as marketers throw around to describe how social our organization, brand, etc. is. While engagement in social media is important, it simply cannot be substituted for ROI. It doesn’t matter how many friends, fans or followers you’ve accumulated, or even how many retweets or wall posts you get. If you can’t track all your hard work back to some sort of conversion – whether that’s a purchase, a sign-up, a donation, or whatever conversion goal you’ve determined – then all of that won’t amount to squat.
Social media ROI is calculated the same way as for any other marketing campaign. I recently read a post on Mashable about how to calculate the ROI of social media, and while it provided a good foundation, it took a basic ROI formula used for more traditional marketing channels and applied it to social media. Using direct mail as an example for comparison, the post would have you believe that you would need to acquire X amount of customers in X amount of time via social media to demonstrate ROI. What it didn’t take into consideration was the time social media actually takes compared to other channels, and that social media is not direct response. What you have to do is take what you know about calculating ROI for your other marketing efforts and apply that in a way that works for your specific social marketing initiatives, knowing that social media is not a quick hit. It requires more direct customer engagement (there’s that buzzword again) and less direct response marketing. Here’s a post that provides an interesting social media take on the traditional ROI formula.
Social media isn’t worth getting into if direct ROI can’t be measured. ROI can be determined in a variety of ways – it just depends on, as I mentioned in #2, what your conversion goals are. You might not be able to track monetary ROI, but you can track other conversions that are just as valuable. Plus, social media can help you uncover a wealth of insights about your customers, your product, your brand, and your organization that can be just as valuable. If you’re able to identify a potential flaw with your product or negative customer service issues through chatter on Twitter, then you can use that information to improve the product or your customer service processes – potentially saving your company grief and/or money in the long run. Don’t you think social media is worth it for that reason, at the very least?
Social media is cheap, so ROI should be high. It may be free to start accounts on any number of social media sites, but the cost in terms of time and resources to manage those outposts the right way is not. Like it or not, social media will take some budget. It may not be as much as a PPC campaign or a print ad, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking that it’s so inexpensive as to automatically yield a high ROI. In fact, according to a recent infographic compiled by Focus.com, the average cost of social media is $210,600 in one year:

What We’re Reading, June 24th

June 24, 2011 by Kari Rippetoe

Happy Friday! As you’re gearing up for your weekend, we’ve compiled a few stand-out blog posts we found interesting this week for your reading pleasure. Social media marketing ROI has been a hot topic for a while, but you can never diminish its importance. In a world where more and more businesses want to jump on the ol’ social media bandwagon, goals, measurement and ROI should be the driving forces behind any social media marketing campaign or program.

Making the Case for Real ROI in Social Marketing from ClickZ – “engagement” is not the same as ROI, and Dave Evans of Social Dynamyx offers ways of linking social marketing to customer service processes to measure “real” ROI.
HOW TO: Calculate the ROI of Your Social Media Campaign from Mashable – this presents a somewhat oversimplified process for calculating social media ROI, but at least provides a good, workable foundation.
Social Media Reality Check: 10 Things to Keep Top-of-Mind – Mitch’s latest for Social Media Today is a checklist of fundamentals to consider before launching into social media.
The Current State of Social Networks [Infographic] from Social Media Today – interesting infographic that covers some relatively unknown social networks, especially given recent data released by LinkedIn about how social networking-savvy men and women are.
Women Still Don’t ‘Get’ LinkedIn, Says LinkedIn from The Atlantic Wire – and here’s a link to that recent data!
How to Hire for Social Media Management from Social Fishing – Maddie Grant of Social Fish has officially called BS on not hiring interns to look after social media. Even though we’ve seen several cases of what can happen when an untrained intern is let loose to handle an organization’s social media presence, Maddie makes a substantial case.

10 Tips for Successful Social Media Contests & Promotions

April 20, 2011 by Mitch Arnowitz

Contests and promotions through social media outposts like Twitter and Facebook are a great way to generate excitement and engage and involve your fans, friends and followers. It’s a key way to get people interacting with your brand, product, event or organization in a meaningful way while helping you to identify your most enthusiastic advocates.

Through our work with a variety of clients at Tuvel Communications, we’ve created and executed several successful social media contests & promotions. You can see some examples of our work, here, here and here.

Along the way, we’ve been able to refine our efforts to maximize results while creating excitement and having fun! By sharing some of our tips, we hope that we can save you time while driving the results that you want. With this in mind, we’ve created our Top 10 list of ways to ensure that your social media contests & promotions are successful:

Get peeps engaged! Don’t just broadcast promotions through social networking outlets. Rather, get folks involved with your brand or organization. We recently ran a Twitter promotion that asked folks to tell us, in 140 characters or less, why they should get a free conference pass. We also ran a promotion that required those interested to provide the contest answer as a comment on the client blog. Create something that allows people to interact directly with your brand – it’s key to getting traction and conversation going in your social media communities.

Have a there-there. Don’t just do a contest for the sake of doing a contest! All of our promotions have a specific purpose. While you want to create buzz and excitement, you also also want to think about the other goals you want to accomplish. Do you want to increase attendance, fund-raise, generate discussion, build an email list or deliver another metric?

Make it simple to participate. Complex games are fun (anyone remember the early days of scavenger hunts that included several websites?) but may attract less participants. It’s great to utilize the “flavor of the month” technologies out there, but keep your audience in mind and don’t make them do anything that will generate more perplexed questions than actual participation.

Create fun and excitement! People love contests and the chance to win prizes. Make ’em interesting and people will play. Convey excitement through messaging. Make your promotion different and, of course, inject personality into it.

Follow best practices. We are careful not to get our clients or bloggers and others into trouble by promoting or creating a contest. Know the rules beforehand. In this game, you can’t beg forgiveness! You can find out more about the rules and regulations here and here.

Offer value and relevance. Find out what turns people on. We have executed many government related promotions. We’ve been told that government types aren’t interested in promotions. Not true! Most people are interested in a contest or giveaway, it’s just a matter of finding out what they like.

Leverage marketing partners. We typically approach client partners that have large followings (fans, friends, followers, subscribers). We then approach these folks so that they might create a special (client) promotion for their readers. Everyone wins in this scenario with partners being able to offer value and our client reaping the rewards!

It’s the total campaign that matters. Promotions are most successful when they are part of a larger, integrated campaign. Involve creative and promote on the website and through email. Our most successful campaigns are seamless and can be played through several social networking platforms.

Make it easy to pick a winner and fulfill. We typically create giveaways so that our clients can randomly choose winners. We also find prizes that can be fulfilled through an email address – gift cards are a good example – make awarding easy. Have you ever had to hunt down snail mail addresses for fulfillment? Logistically, it can be a painful process!

Don’t stop! Promotions help to create traction and momentum. Continue the conversation, get others involved and grow your supporters. In other words: be a smart marketer!