Social Media & Marketing ROI

Social Media is a hot topic in professional services marketing.  And ROI is a hot potato in marketing, period. Put the two together and you end up with burning questions like “What’s the ROI of Social Media?”

Michelle Golden argues, skilfully, that it’s the wrong question.  You should focus on the ROI of marketing initiatives.

My take, influenced by Michelle’s analysis is that the better question is:

“Does social media IMPROVE my marketing ROI” (whether for an individual marketing initiative – or across all my marketing initiatives).

Clearly, done right social media can (amongst other things) increase awareness, stimulate new conversations and relationships and increase readership/viewership of firm “content”. If awareness, relationships and engagement are parts of the firms existing marketing ROI equation they should be able to evaluate the uplift (or otherwise) from social media.

Of course that assumes the firm knows the ROI of its current marketing activities…..