How to Make Dollars and Sense Out of Social Media Marketing

While many are marketers are Twiddling with Twitter and Futzing with Facebook, we all know time spent online is money so here are 3 key factors to measure your social media ROI (Return On Investment).

The first factor is to get your baseline. To show how social media marketing impacts your business over time, take a snapshot of your starting numbers. The key figure to grab is revenue. Also consider tracking average customer spending, foot traffic, the ratio of new to repeat customers, and website traffic.

The next factor is to calculate your costs. A controversial term for determining worth, ROI is revered by numbers types and disdained by brand marketers. There are many different formulas for quantifying ROI - which is one reason why the concept is controversial. But, simply put, ROI is a correlation between the resources a company spends on an effort and the money it generates in return. To calculate the ratio, subtract the money your company spends ramping up your social media presence from the amount of revenue your online effort generates. Then divide that figure by your initial investment.

Finally, here are some tools for accurate measurement.

Facebook Insights: Businesses that create Facebook Pages can use insights to get data on customers' interaction. Easy-to-read graphs visually display online activities such as likes, active users, and comments.

HootSuite: A standalone desktop application and a mobile phone app, HootSuite offers free and paid models. The service is quite comprehensive, but novice users can jump right in to track statistics and analytics that interpret online influence.

NutshellMail: This free service brings regularly delivered reports to users via email on social media activity including comments from Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter as well as reviews from Yelp, Citysearch, and Foursquare. It is a one-a-day way to stay in the know.

Social Mentions: This free service emails reports on any search term you submit. Reports include top keywords, users, hashtags, sources, and sentiment data. It also has a "passion" scoring system that measures repeat mentions.

TweetDeck: Similar to HootSuite , TweetDeck connects users to practically any social media service. It is currently in use both through a desktop interface and a mobile app but it lacks some of the in-depth data of its competitor.

The key is to gather the numbers and use them to help you convert followers into customers.

This blog, and related posts, will continue to provide a blueprint for making money online with Affiliate Marketing. You will find step-by-step road maps for various parts of the Affiliate Marketing business. You will find tools, education, training, and support. And you will find a community of like minded entrepreneurs that are using the Internet to get out of debt, build wealth, and secure their financial future forever.

I hope you enjoyed the post and let me know what you think.

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