Measuring ROI on Social Media

[NickCybela]

What sort of ROI have you been seeing with social media?

I would break this down as:

ROI Blog
ROI Social Networking (if you're tracking it)
ROI Reputation Management

Given that:
- 73% of consumers said they would be likely to use dealership reviews and rankings for future vehicle purchases. (2007 Dealer eBusiness Performance Study, Cobalt (Y! and R.L. Polk))

- 21% of consumers have switched dealerships because of reviews (2007 Dealer eBusiness Performance Study, Cobalt (Y! and R.L. Polk))

- 6% sales loss on brands that didn’t use social media. 18% increase on those that did (2009, Altimer Group and Wetpaint)

 

[JohnScott]

I've been struggling to calculate a reasonable ROI on a managed social media platform, but put together a few numbers based off data available on the subject.

"The problem with trying to determine ROI for social media is you are trying to put numeric quantities around human interactions and conversations, which are not quantifiable." -from the article





Here is an interesting commentary on ROI andsocial media, I think her point is that its not about "numbers" , but the "value of the conversations they have?"

What Is The ROI For Social Media? | Social Media Explorer

the comments below the article are really interesting. I have to say that I agree with her.

It sounds like everyone is STRUGGLING to calculate ROI numbers for social media , maybe that says it all?

 

[VJnator]

Difficult but manageable. I just finished a review ROI on my Social media activities with following results:
Since writing my open Blog for BMW of South Atlanta, our website traffic increased for our home URL in 12 months by plus 39%. The combination of content and tagging relevant words in the blog helped us to maintain top1-3 ranking on Google. Not only does our dealer URL show up, but also our blog, twitter, flickr and even the youtube channel. I even could notice 5% increase of traffic coming to the dealer URL directly through twitter.
Links on the dealer home URL also connecting blog and micro-blog and generate through these links a round-robin, which brings the consumer most likely back to the point-of-sale.
My conclusion is that we can't really talk about of a ROI in social marketing ambitions, but more likely having a great opportunity to create a "ROB - Return On Blog", which will help to manifest a closer relation between consumer and brand and increased reputation management.