1.      How do you measure the Return on Investment (ROI) of your social media marketing efforts?

Some say it is quite difficult to measure return on investment of your social media marketing campaigns but in reality it is all about careful planning and setting clear and achievable every day objectives. You could, for instance, outline what your targets will be with regard to each social channel you will be concentrating on.

Your ROI metric could be:

–          For Facebook campaigns: the total number of ‘likes’, people talking about your business, shares

–          For Twitter: number of followers, re-tweets and mentions

–          For all channels: the number of new prospects and leads, getting meaningful consumer insights (through polls, surveys etc), understanding customer demographics through statistics

–          For your blog: number of comments and subscribers

–          Your ultimate ROI measure for your overall campaign would be the value and volume of new sales achieved

2.      What are the latest trends in social media marketing?

Social media marketing is a constantly evolving field and I would advise people to regularly update their knowledge by reading articles and publications on the topic to keep abreast of new developments.

–          I would say that various social promotions (social coupons, group deals, sweepstakes) have been gaining more popularity among marketers. An example could be Facebook Offers.

–          Another intriguing issue is the continued rise of Pinterest: “Pinterest users reported a surprisingly high correlation between pinning and subsequent purchasing: more than 1 in 5 Pinterest users has pinned an item that they later purchased. In the social world, this is a high conversion rate”. (Harvard Business Review : “Moving customers from pinning to purchase”).

3.      What are the most effective social media marketing channels?

–          It all depends on your business goals and objectives and on your target audience. For instance, LinkedIn is a great platform for B2B marketing and Facebook and Twitter are effective channels to market to consumers. You can have a mix of channels to cater for both business and consumer audiences.

4.      What are the advantages and disadvantages of social media marketing?

The advantages of devoting time to social media marketing definitely outweigh the disadvantages, but it is crucial to remember that businesses and entrepreneurs should strive to combine online and offline marketing to achieve balanced and high quality outcomes. Social media marketing alone is not going to acquire you as many clients or make your brand as visible as offline and online strategies combined.

From my experience, however, the main advantages of social media marketing are as follows:

–          It provides you with extensive word of mouth advertising

–          It has potential to ‘humanise’ your brand

–          It results in engagement of wide audiences

–          You can provide great customer service and demonstrate true consumer orientation of your brand

–          It can significantly improve SEO (search engine optimisation) of your company

–          You can conduct cost-effective market research online (polls, surveys etc)

With regard to disadvantages:

–          It is very time consuming to put in place an effective integrated social media strategy

–          Your efforts can fail if you over-promote, over-advertise

–          It takes a lot of commitment and consistency

I would be happy to receive further questions on social media marketing and will endeavour to answer them in my next post. Please feel free to email questions or comments to careercoaching.ccv@gmail.com or via the comment box below.

Dasha  Amrom