Social Media Management – Maximizing your ROI

According to the Social Media Marketing Report of 2011, a third of all social media marketers want to know how to monitor and measure the return of investment (ROI) of social media. In other words the top question marketers most want answered is how to monitor, measure and track the ROI of social media activities.

The purpose of this article about social media management is to share ideas on maximizing your ROI.

How to show a ROI in terms of time and resources spent

When spending time on any type of marketing in business make sure that you’re maximizing your return on investment (ROI). This means that the money or time that you spend on your social media should be giving you a return of some sort. The important thing about ROI is that you must determine in advance what you expect social media to do for you. This is done by creating a social media strategy. You can find a free social media strategy template here to customize for your own use.

The ROI Challenge

The problem is that most people who use social media, don’t track ROI at all. They might track money spent, but they do not factor in their time spent at all. Even when they spend an exorbitant amount of time on social media there is no accounting for it. The sad fact is if the time spent isn’t planned out, and mapped out with specific goals in mind, much of that time is not productive.

Since marketers do not manage the impact of their use of social media, they’re not aware that they might simply be wasting time. Time suckers exist in every business, but social media, like long phone calls, can be a big time sucker in your business if you allow it to be.

How to maximize your ROI

There are ways to maximize your ROI when using social media. One way is by the strategic use of automation tools. Various types of automation for social media enable you to create content once and distribute throughout all your channels. There is also automation to schedule posts on blogs, even plugins that enable a publisher to publish and schedule many posts with a push of a button.

Other types of automation actually respond to new people, such as auto tweets to new followers, and auto following on Twitter as well as constant re-tweets and re-sending of the same messages at different times throughout the day.

What are some key metrics to use?

It is important to identify some key metrics for each of the chosen social media marketing tactics. Here are a few ideas of possible metrics to use:

• Blogging: Subscribers to blog and newsletter
• Twitter: Number of friends and followers
• Facebook: Referrals from social networks
• LinkedIn: Connections and recommendations on LinkedIn

The important thing to remember is by actively managing your social media efforts, you can and should monitor, track and measure in order to maximize your ROI.

Please share in the comments section about ways you use to maximize your ROI.