There is no shortage of bloggers talking about how to apply Social Media to your business. Most of the time it is repetitive and regurgitated information from many sources. No doubt you have probably already read some of these countless articles about Social Media. What’s my point? The point is that it obviously takes a strategy to be successful with Social Media. What do all those posts and articles have in common? They all show you the steps or a strategy of how to use social media to get your ROI (Return on Investment).

Bosses, CEOs, Presidents, etc. are always concerned about the ROI or the “bottom line,” and rightfully so. Social Media is a set of tools. Much like a cell phone, your computer or the car you drive, the ROI with Social Media is often hard, but not impossible to measure.

So what’s the investment with Social Media? Websites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. are all free websites. You’re not spending any money to use those services. So where’s the investment? The investment is the time you and/or your social media maven spend on putting together a plan of action, setting goals and measuring those actions. His/her salary is the investment. The return on those investments can be measured with number of followers/fans, number in interactions with those “friends” or the best ROI, someone buying your product(s) or service(s).

In one of Seth Godin’s recent posts he discusses using the right hammer for the job. As I mentioned above, Social Media is a set of tools. You have to use the right tools for that project. If you are repairing a fence, you probably do not want to use a manual hammer as it would take much more time then you would want to invest in or pay for. Just because Twitter is available, does it make it the right tool you for your business? Just because Company A has a fan page, does that mean you should too? Maybe. That’s where some more investment comes in. The investment of research time or a discovery period. You have to know what your audience is doing and/or using. If your target audience is using Twitter/Facebook, then by all means, sign up and tweet to your heart’s content.

This brings me to my next point. Most of us in the industry are familiar with the 70/20/10 “rule,” or social media engagement formula. 70% of your posts/tweets is spent sharing resources, giving out free information and linking to other people’s blogs. 20% of this time is on collaborations or directly responding and connecting with your followers/fans. The last 10% is for self-promotion, company culture and maybe even a little trivial information.

The Social Media Anchor

Much like an anchor, there are many applications of Social Media to keep you steady in a rough ocean of buzz-words, catch phrases, “Gurus” & “Experts”. The following illustration is something I came up with while my team was putting together a presentation for our Hack Day. It shows the actions that can be used to send visitors to your main site with the use of Social Media tools such as a Blog. The blog is then set up to auto-post to Twitter which feeds your status update on Facebook, so on and so forth.

The goal of most- if not all- websites is to make  some sort of conversion. Whether it is a form submission, a request for quote or purchasing a product, at the end of the day, those are the actions that count and make a difference. Using Social Media as an anchor will help reach that goal if used correctly with a solid strategy and well thought out campaign.

One of the important things to remember about social media is the human element. Set your goals and keep monitoring them as the human element will ultimately find the rate of success of your campaigns.

How are your social media efforts working out?

Photo credit: PSD

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