Social media has become an important marketing medium and businesses cannot think of any marketing plan in which social media promotions are not included. But when we talk about social media promotions for large and medium businesses, the inevitable question about ROI comes into picture. Thus, our aim in the following section would be to look into whether it is possible to measure return on investment for social promotions and how to calculate it.
ROI on Social Media Promotions
In any marketing strategy, the goal is to assist the user while he or she is completing the sale process. Earlier the website owner was in control of user’s experience on the site but nowadays things have changed and user has more control in any conversation. Users can now select what will work for them, what they want and from where they want to get it. Thus with the advent of social media, the focus has shifted from having a website to rather having web presence. Websites provide only on-site experience while if we look at web presence, it has a broader approach in which social profiles and many other sites such as review sites are also part of it. Nowadays it is important to share information with users throughout their journey while they are on the site so that they themselves find the details they are searching for. Thus, you will need to have good features as well as content on the site to lure prospective buyers. But you must be thinking that all this means you can only influence the buyers decisions and cannot control them, so how ROI can be measured in such situation.
Use of Metrics
Normally users know about your site on social sites and then visit it, discuss with friends about what they think, go through reviews and then finalize on two to three sites before starting any conversation with any of the websites about the price. Thus social media works like a PR for your company but its value cannot be directly correlated with revenue generated on the site.
However, you can still know about ROI from social media tasks in the form of a contributing factor in any conversation instead of having direct correlation. Some advanced analytics suites such as the Adobe Suite can help you analyze the history of conversations that occurred before a conversion as far back as possible.
Summary:
Social media plays its part in revenue generation process for any website but it is not completely direct and goes through several steps.
