What exactly is the ROI of social media? When Gary Vaynerchuk was asked this question, he replied, “What is the ROI of your mom?” Obviously Gary was illustrating that just because it may not be possible to provide a quantitative assessment of a campaign, doesn’t mean it lacks ROI. And, for that matter, it doesn’t mean you cannot measure it.
I’ve written about this topic before, specifically about Facebook’s ROI, as well as measuring social media. Last week I presented on the topic at the Social Media Strategies Summit in Las Vegas.
Tomorrow (2/15/2012), I will be presenting on the subject live, in Northern Virginia as part of Social Media Week (DC). You can find more info about my presentation and how to attend for free here:
http://socialmediaweek.org/event/?event_id=1176
We have nearly 200 attendees registered.
If you cannot make it, I will be uploading parts of the presentation (recorded) as well as some materials to this blog later in the week. So bookmark this post and check back in a couple of days for those materials.
2 responses to “What is the ROI of Social Media?”
Great presentation this morning. Particularly liked seeing the different charts/dashboards used to report metrics.
That’s a fun quote, and I might ask Mr. Vaynerchuk about wine, but ROI, not so much 🙂
The Direct Marketing Association estimates the return on investment, on the dollar, for social networks as $12.71 (2011). Compare that to email marketing, the highest return tactic, of $40.56
I do see the value of social media. But even among expert marketers, there is confusion and not a lot of confidence out there about ROI and social media. In a recent survey of chief marketing officers published in eMarketer, most of them said they weren’t using the platforms, they didn’t know what the ROI was, or there was less than stellar performance associated with social media. 15% said Facebook returned a significant level of ROI, 11% gave the thumbs up to Twitter, 11% said LinkedIn brought in significant ROI, and just over 8% said they could attribute a significant ROI from blogs.
Is that fair? Is that accurate? Given that so many don’t know if there is a return or not, maybe not. Maybe those percentages would be a bit higher. Who can say? I think the measurement of the impact of social media is still evolving.
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