Social media Success (ROI) is a Numbers Game

Renowned author and personal-development legend Jim Rohn used to say: ‘What we lack in skill we can make up in numbers!’ Have you built a habit of going through your numbers? Do you know what social media numbers really count in your business? If you want to learn more on social media ROI, I invite you to continue reading.

Know Your Social Media Numbers

Here’s the secret value in knowing your numbers. Study your numbers and watch for the upward trends. Key question: “is your business doing better now than yesterday, last week, last month, last year, three years ago, five years ago, etc…”. And if the answer is a solid “no”. The next obvious question is: “what do we need to do to change the numbers and make our business grow”?

Let us apply this for a moment to social media investments. How do you know if your social media efforts are paying off? What numbers do you have to check for social media ROI? To answer that question, you need to check your purchase funnel: the visualization of your customers journey, from the moment they were exposed to you or your brand for the first time, up to the moment they decided to take action.

Nichole Kelly -president of SME Digital – has just released a new book How to Measure Social Media: A Step-By-Step Guide to Developing and Assessing Social Media ROI.

In this book, Nichole aligns social media to the sales funnel to develop a complete framework to monitor your social media ROI. But, first things first. There’s no point in checking your numbers if you don’t know what you are trying to achieve! So, start with defining your clear social media goals. Social media marketing -as any other type of marketing- should be focused on one or all of the following goals:

1. increase brand awareness;
2. generate quality leads;
3. retain customers;

In her new book, Nichole explains how Social media allow you to “extend” your sales funnel. Social media expose your brand to new audiences (brand exposure), connect with influencers (brand influencers) and foster engagement (interaction with your brand).

Take advantage of the social media multiplier

Social media have the amazing multiplier effect, that when people interact with your brand, this accelerates your reach massively. And on top of that you get rewarded with social proof -especially if social media key influencers support your brand. Now, generating more reach -with the help of influencers- should be aimed at engaging your audience. You want your target audience to respond (interact with your brand). My dear social media companion Mari Smith has said this many times “Content is king but engagement is queen, and she rules the house”. People who interact with your brand (content) are more likely to buy from your brand if they have taken the time to engage with it (content).

Be patient!

This brings us to the next stage in the sales funnel: action and conversion. Here’s a super important lesson to remember. Social media lead generation takes time. People who interact with your content may not be ready to buy what you have to offer. But, by continuously sharing something of value to them, they will be more inclined to buy from you when they are ready. So, be patient! If all your social media efforts have resulted in a sale, make sure you keep adding value to your newly acquired customer. Social media offer an excellent opportunity to nurture enduring relationships with your clientage. They will reward you with coming back to buy more and referring you to others.

Takeaway: here is your social media numbers takeaway. If you value this article I would urge you to buy Nichole Kelly’s new book How to Measure Social Media: A Step-By-Step Guide to Developing and Assessing Social Media ROI. In this book Nichole shares a ton of tools for collecting your numbers. If you want to make 2013 an even better year than 2012, this is the time to get this book and study the content.

Thanks for reading and I’d love to hear your opinion and invite you to share this with your peeps! Thanks again.