Proving the ROI of social media
As I’ve mentioned before, measuring the ROI of social media on a campaign level is pretty tricky and as Sandrine pointed out a couple of weeks ago, companies may need to take a long term view in order to fully reap the benefits of social media.
However, in theory, working out the ROI of a social media programme is easy (assuming you’re measuring it over a long enough time period), as Olivier Blanchard shows us in this presentation:
Of course, there’s a lot more more to it in practice (even without resorting to econometrics, which is of course why our consultancy services may come in handy):
- In step 3 (slides 44-46), you should also consider measuring other things like:
- Customer retention/loyalty (to understand why this is important, have a read of Chris Stephenson’s overview or his entire paper on the subject)
- Net Promoter Score (see Paul Marsden’s study around NPS and how advocacy drives growth)
- Brand equity (Andrew Sharp sharp gives a good overview of why you should be thinking about this).
- In steps 6 & 7 (slides 54-55) it’s possible there will be a significant lag between your efforts in social media and their potential effects so try to take this into account when looking for them