Prove it! Social Media ROI for Business – Please vote for our SXSW Panel

Keith Burtis, the Community Manager at Best Buy has put together a team of Social Media Superstars to create a presentation for SXSW – The South By SouthWest Interactive Conference titled “Prove it! Social Media ROI for Business”

The Panel includes Jay Berkowitz; Allan Isfan; Justin Levy; Amber Naslund and Jason Falls. Each of the panel members has offered to preview their presentation on their blog to give you a sample of the presentation. Here is my sample of Social Media ROI, and below are links to the other members of our esteemed panel.

Oh, and one small favor, please 🙂 Panels at SXSW are voted on by you. If you like our topic, please take a moment to register for SXSW and vote for our panel!

The Most Important Way to Measure Social Media ROI

The most important way to measure ROI (Return on Investment) for all internet activities including Social Media is to quantify the specific actions people take on your website. If you sell something on your site it is very straightforward to measure how many people made a purchase on your site after coming to your site from a Social Media website. If you don’t sell anything on your site you can measure a ‘conversion action’ such as a completed ‘Contact Us’ form or an eNewsletter subscription.

Google Analytics is free and it is a very reliable way to measure what happens on your website,. This program can tell you which websites people came from, and it can measure what they do on your website. It is very easy to add a conversion code on the sales confirmation page or ‘goal’ such as a completed Contact Us form. Every site that doesn’t have a high end analytics program should have Google Analytics in place.

Ten Golden Rules doesn’t sell products we are a B2B (Business to Business) site, we don’t measure direct sales, we measure leads on our site. In this example below, we looked at traffic to our Ten Golden Rules website from Social Media website Twitter. This site sent 492 visits from my www.Twitter.com/JayBerkowitz account. 2.44 percent of those site visitors signed up for our free eNewsletter, .41 percent requested a website consultation and .20 percent completed a Contact Us form, overall 3.05 percent of site visitors became a lead for our company or they opted-in to our database. We track the sources of our clients and we are able to determine the ROI from our Social Media activities.

Social Media Sponsorships = ROI

Another form of measurable ROI from Social Media can come in the form of sponsorships.

Our Ten Golden Rules Internet Marketing Podcast, a recent SOFIE Award Winner for best Use of New Media, has had two sponsors, SilverPOP and GoToMeeting.

In addition, the Podcast has generated invitations for high profile speaking engagements, media coverage and clients for Ten Golden Rules internet agency.

Here are the posts from my fellow panelists on how to generate ROI from Social Media:

Prove it, Social Media ROI for Business – Keith Burtis

Two ways to generate and measure Social Media ROI – Allan Isfan

Social Media ROI? Traditional Is Still More Accepted – Jason Falls

Return on Eyeballs: The new ROI – Sue Murphy