Social media is a critical component of any digital marketing strategy. Both B2C and B2B companies are experimenting with a variety of social media channels to build awareness, generate leads and engage with customers and industry influencers. But is there positive ROI from these efforts?

To address this question, the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California  recently presented a panel discussion on “Social ROI: How to Transform Myth Into Reality”. Moderators included Carter Hostelley, CEO of Leadtail; Karri Carlson, VP Social Insights, Leadtail; and Gretchen Hoffman, VP Global Lead Generation & Field Marketing at NetBase. Panelists included Dennis Shiao, Director of Product Marketing at DNN; Molly McCarty, Social Account Manager at 3Q Digital; Alex Flagg, Director of Market Insights, Enterprise Division at HP and Ajay Ramachandran, SVP, Corporate Development, Enterprise Division at Dynamic Signal.

Here are some take-aways from the presentation and discussion:

Tips to calculate social ROI:

  • Don’t lump all social media in one bucket just as you wouldn’t lump email marketing in with tradeshows. Rather, measure results by social channel, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN, etc.
  • Social advertising – measure campaign performance including CPA (cost per acquisition) and CTR (click through rate)
  • Social selling – measure Contacts and Leads
  • Social Advocacy – measure CTR for brand or employee-generated content
  • Awareness – measure page views, clicks and promoted Tweets

Landing Pages:

  • Create a dedicated landing page per channel and offer. For example – a Tweet only has 140 characters so the Landing page will need more content then an email promoting the same offer.
  • On your web forms, add an optional field for Twitter handle and populate into your CRM. Employee emails change often, but most people do not change their Twitter handle.

Social sites:

  • Use Bitly to create short URLs for each channel and measure the number of clicks
  • Facebook – test ads and measure clicks and CPA. Use Custom Audiences, interest targets and demographics (age and gender) to define your target audience. Use retargeting ads which Facebook offers (and other platforms) to reach people who visited your website but abandoned prior to converting. Molly McCarty at 3Q Digital has seen a 602% increase in CVR (conversion rate) and 72% decrease in CPA using retargeting ads.
  • LinkedIN – build your corporate page and followers; test targeted ads (great for B2B)
  • Twitter – useful for social selling and engaging with media contacts
  • Twitter ads are great for brand building and for promoting events

Cultivate ambassadors:

People trust communication from your company’s employees and customers much more so than from your CEO or corporate brand. Look for influencers in your space and cultivate relationships with them. Then find people within your company (ambassadors) to produce content and engage with the influencers. A good goal is to have ambassadors from 8% of your employee base. The benefit for employees can be intrinsic, such as building their personal brand, and extrinsic, such as spiffs or other rewards. HP has used gamification technology to build its blog ambassadors program.

Dynamic Signal provides an employee advocacy platform for managing these programs. According to Ajay Ramachandran of Dynamic Signal, “Social ambassadors cumulatively outperform all official brand channels when sharing the exact same piece of content”. Employee advocates are proving in real ROI via social selling (using LinkedIN and Twitter primarily), sharing marketing content, and social recruiting (by sharing job listings). Produce good, relevant content and make it easy to share (via mobile devices) and employees will participate.

Events:

For promoting events, Facebook is great for posting photos about the event location and building buzz. During the event, Tweet often using the event hashtag. Post event – publish summaries to your blog, presentations to SlideShare and videos to YouTube, Vimeo and your website.

Content Marketing:

Useful rules for content marketing:

  • Social Media 4-1-1 rule (from the Content Marketing Institute). Share four pieces of content from industry influencers relevant to your target audience, one piece of original educational content (soft promotion), and one self-serving sales piece.
  • 4-1-1 rule for Twitter (from TippingPoint Labs).  “Tweet 4 pieces of relevant original content from others and re-tweet 1 relevant tweet for every 1 self-promoting tweet”.
  • 1/3 rule – self promo 1/3 of the time, industry news 1/3 of the time, something funny 1/3 of the time

Tools:

Big data for social is a growing industry. There are many social monitoring and  analytics companies, including NetBase, to help you manage and measure your online presence.  Here is a recent top 10 list of social tools from VentureBeat.

Do you have social marketing ROI stories to share? I’ve love to hear from you.