Everyone is obsessed with the ROI of social media. Rightly so – a business would be crazy to throw good money after bad. Still, much discussion of gauging the return on investing in social media campaigns seems locked in traditional marketing paradigms. A company asks, “What will we get from engaging in social media?” A recent article from the MIT Sloan Management Review suggests a better question: “What will your customers get from your social media efforts?”
Instead of obsessing over where to put social media expenditures in one’s spreadsheet and how to calculate the dollars returned, companies should spend more time thinking about whether their efforts provide any value-added to consumers. If your tweets don’t inform, connect, or entertain your customers, then what is their incentive to consume your content?
Framing investment in social media in terms of content-consumption allows a company to use a little common sense. Customers are not captive audiences on the internet. It’s their world; we just live in it. What customers want, above all else, is reliable information about products and services. They will always visit third-party sites like google and yelp to find out about your business. You should encourage them to do so by providing discounts for reviews – of any kind – on popular ratings sites. Even negative reviews present an opportunity: you can message the customer in plain sight, respond to her complaint, and improve your service.
A fear I’ve heard before about providing useful information to consumers is that they’ll snipe the information, then go elsewhere for the product. As a customer recently said about the defunct Borders chains, “I’d go to Borders to find a book, and then I’d go to Amazon to buy it.” While this is ubiquitous in the social media environment, your goal isn’t to prevent it. It’s to manage it by adding value to your social media relationship with customers. Provide discounts or price-matching, reduced shipping rates, or other incentives to build customer loyalty and repeat business.
Counterintuitively, once you begin thinking this way about social media, identifying ROI for your social media efforts loses its mystery. Once you use social media analytics to identify the interaction you’re getting from customers, the benefit of platforms like twitter to your revenue stream seems self-evident. The trick for businesses entering the social media environment is to realize that doing so means adding a business on top of the business you already have. If you’re a retailer, tech startup, or supplier, entering twitter means attracting and keeping twitter clients who will consume your content. That’s where TweetsByUs can help you thrive.
