Erik Sass at the blog, The Social Graf wrote a very interesting article recently on the ROI companies are achieving through investments in social media. For instance, he references a survey be eMarketer that found that only 15.4% of respondents believed Facebook was delivering “significant ROI”.  (http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=144511&nid=123539)

I would content that those who are not obtaining ROI from their investments in sites such as Facebook and Twitter are not using it properly. In fact, most businesses frankly don’t know “squat” about social media. They don’t know how to use it for:

• customer engagement
• customer service
• listening/feedback/surveys
• market research
• lead generation
• advertising

One particular client of mine had a Facebook page and thought they were done with social media. They had a Twitter handle and once or twice a week would post a PR or a event announcement. Seriously. I helped them understand how to achieve value from social media by putting together an easy to follow action plan that enabled them to leverage, monitor, measure and succeed from their investment.

In another instance, I had someone try advertising on Facebook (the largest site in the world when it comes to display advertising inventory. This client frankly didn’t understand Facebook and treated with limited respect. The result was a campaign that failed to deliver positive ROI. When I took over the campaign and helped rebuild it, we took the campaign from only generating $0.20 per dollar invested, to generating $1.85 per dollar invested in only two weeks. (That’s an increase of 9x if I don’t want to be modest.)

The bottom line is most businesses aren’t good at social media. So I encourage them to make a small investment in bringing in temporary help to get them up to speed and on the righteous path to success.