How Marketers Are Using Social Media to Grow Their Businesses

Everytime we meet a prospect for Social Media Marketing there are few questions which are common amongst all of them. (1) How do I measure social media return on investment? (2) What are the social media best practices for my business? and (3)How much time would it take for the social media campaign to show results?

These days majority of the marketers from IBM to local ice cream parlour in the town are using social media for generating exposure for the business,increasing traffic and building new business partnerships.

Let us come down to our first important question. How do I measure social media return on investment? Many a time I have faced questions like I paid XYZ amount and I got only so and so likes on facebook is my Social Media campaign a success or not? Firstly, I would like to mention that no campaign can be measured as a success or a failure from the no of likes, followers etc. The key measuring elements that need to be considered while calculating the ROI of any campaign are customer satisfaction, revenues and brand loyalty.

According to the latest survey by SocialMediaExaminer it has been observed that majority of the marketers make use of Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Blog as the top rated social media practices for their business. With the help of these practices people have observed numerous benefits for their ventures like generate exposure for the business, increase site traffic/subscription, opportunities for new business partnerships, helped rise in search ranking, generating qualified leads, help sell products/services/close business deals and last but not the least reduced overall marketing expenditure.

Now for the most important question How much time would it take for the social media campaign to show results? Any marketing activity requires a lot of patience, working with social media is also the same. Any campaign worked upon dedicatedly i.e. spending 6hrs – 11hrs a week for over 2-3 months would start showing good results. Many a times we have observed that depending upon the sector and the concept of the campaign, companies start enjoying the results from the first month itself.

“Right now there’s too much focus on social media marketing and content marketing. True inbound marketing involves knowing which tactics work – which pieces of content, calls to action, forms and emails generated the most leads. It’s integrating your SEO efforts together with your content generation and sharing, with your advertising, your lead nurturing, your analytic, measurement and A/B testing, with every tool you use and 
everything you do as a marketer.”

Designing a social media campaign in itself is an art with no hidden secrets.