The ROI of Social Media
The ROI of Social Media
A lot people are diving into social media marketing but they don’t know what is the ROI. Are sales increasing?
Social Media is about being Social. It’s about Networking
When you go to an event, you are there to network and build relationships. You aren’t making any sales, but you know that if people like you and they know what you do, one day they will find you when they need you. They will also tell their friends when someone asks about similar services.
If you are at an event just trying to close sales, no one will like you. You might get 1-2 more sales, but you piss off everyone and no one wants to associate with you afterwards.
In Social Media, you are there to build brand and relationships, not to convert immediate sales.
At the end of the day, Social Media is like brand building and networking: no immediate ROI, but indispensable for business.
What’s the ROI of a Bill Board?
Companies can’t measure how much ROI their Bill Boards are generating, but they still do it anyway. You’re not supposed to put up a billboard and take it down after 2 weeks if your extra sales has not been able to cover the billboard costs.
Social Media is about building trust and relationships. And that requires patience.
Great post. So many people are focused on the metrics of followers, hits, pageviews and clickthroughs that they forget one of the biggest parts of marketing: making relationships. It’s not even that first relationship or that 50th that might get you your next sale, but it’s a slow battle that you continue to fight and build. Maybe it’s that 100th relationship that ends up converting a sale or helps drive traffic to your site.
People who go into social media with an entirely selfish and single-minded approach will inevitably fail. In fact, they’ve already failed. I think of it this way: the salesperson (especially in social media) is the guy you don’t want at your party. He’s the guy who’s pestering everyone asking them to look at his product, and ruining everyone’s time. The marketer is the guy who everyone loves to have around and he uses his (interesting, noteworthy and potentially revolutionary) product to actually create interest and add to the conversation. It’s a fine line sometimes, but an important one to take heed of.
Thanks for the great insight Jaremy!
I totally agree with you that entirely selfish and singled-minded approaches will inevitably fail.
However, I would also argue that the best sales people never try to aggressively sell the first time they interact with someone. They ALWAYS first build trust and develop relationships. I think the desperate sale’s people might make 1-2 sales, but ultimately they run out of business because everyone avoids them.
Absolutely. I was referring to a hypothetical person focused on the sale vs. building a brand. I’m actually starting my own little experiment on Twitter, to see the difference between a group of Twitter “friends” and Twitter “followers” – you might get a kick out of it: Twitter Experiment.
My hope is to prove that a small group of people with whom you’ve built a relationship and trust is more powerful than a large group of people with no relationship. We’ll see what happens
Haha, awesome! Well I can tell you right here that I have seen an account with 2000 followers who tweet and didn’t get as much traffic as my cofounder @junloayza when he only had 500 followers. So I’ve seen a small result of your experiment. Eager to see your results!
Agree with Jaremy. The core of Social Media Markting should be build up relationships and build up communities.
Yup, Jaremy is a smart cookie