Social Media Marketing – How to get your ROI

Posted on Categories Vacation Rental Marketing

We live in a world where people want immediate gratification and MUST see their revenue directly related to social media or their not buying in to the fact that there IS a strong return coming from a social media investment. I'm going to take you through a few reasons why social media has never been so important to your business.

•    25% of ALL US traffic is Facebook
•    More time is spent on Facebook than: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Bing & YouTube; COMBINED
•    YouTube receives over 2 billion viewers per day and is the 2nd most popular search engine
•    Over 750 MILLION users are now on Facebook!

Now that you know your brand MUST be involved in social media, let me show you 5 other ways to effectively measure the success of your efforts and the return on your investment.

Customer feedback and sentiment

Whether you like it or not, customers will have both good and bad experiences throughout the life of your company (hopefully more good), and they need a way to share it. Before anyone thinks about going to an actual review site, many of them choose to post at a place where over 750 Million other people are and where over 25% of all time spent online is; Facebook. Good experiences shared here are automatically shared with all of their connections on Facebook and bad experiences give you a chance to publicly make them better.
→ If you could identify all of the bad experiences from customers and make them better before they will inevitably share that experience with 100+ friends, would you?
→ If you could take every person that had a good experience and turn it into a personal endorsement to all of their friends, would you? (avg. facebook user has 130 “friends” on Facebook)

Social media customers are more valuable
A case study from CareOne <http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-customer-value/> shows you just how much more valuable your social media clients are likely to be over your clients that aren't involved with your social media.

Top of mind advertising
As people engage with your social media channels and “Like”/ “Follow” your brand, they will be noticing your posts and looking at your logo.  This keeps your business on the top of their mind next time they go to purchase a product or service that you offer.

How much are impressions and traffic worth?
I manage a brand that receives roughly 200,000 page views a month, but yields over 1 million impressions on Facebook alone each month.  Facebook and Twitter are consistently 2 of the top 10 referrers of traffic.

Control the search engine

When you Google your business name, what comes up?  Likely, many of your potential customer will perform this action, what will they see?  If you have anything negative or potentially negative, possibly a competitor comes up, you can control this by allowing social networks to dominate this placement.

I too am a bottom-line, metric driven individual that needs to tie every marketing effort to the bottom-line.  I encourage you to be a little more open minded about what you are measuring and where you find the value in your social media efforts.  It's not all about immediate sales, or even traffic; you could be measuring brand mentions within social media, impressions within social media, overall targeted fan/follower acquisition (which is truly more than just a number), number of messages sent to your social media followers, and more!  Let us help you understand what your social media objectives are and how we can accomplish them!