What are the top steps to take to ensure you're getting the best ROI for your social media efforts?

A common pitfall, I see, is that social media is engaged as a communication channel that is separate from other, more traditional marketing activities. Social media needs to be recognized as another communication channel, albeit with a built-in capability to capture consumer feedback, often in real time.

When a social media strategy is being developed, it should be in full alignment with a broader, product marketing strategy - one supports the other.

Marketing programs are designed to establish awareness of an issue, trend, or challenge that a target audience is, or may soon be, impacted by. This can be achieved by seeding social media channels with the right questions and answers from a control group, to get a discussion started. The answers will, directly or indirectly, suggest recommended solutions to the issue/challenge/trend described earlier. As this is seen to be coming from apparent "end users", the theory is that it will be a catalyst for broader acceptance, and awareness will spread.

Marketing programs then need to generate demand. Social media can also drive this. When the awareness phase has developed sustainable momentum, social media can be leveraged to distribute messages about the "ideal solution" along with positive comments from a control group.

The key is to coordinate these activities. It is extremely difficult to measure the effectiveness of a social media program. Applying it to specific activities of a broader marketing strategy not only makes it more effective; it also makes it more measurable.

Used wisely, with well-researched targeting, compelling key messages, a strong differentiator, and a coordinated communication plan, social media can be a valuable, additional, communication channel. But those who put up a Facebook page or try to keep a Twitter feed updated, just because they feel they have to, are wasting their time.

Here's a 3 step process to make social marketing produce LEADS and SALES.

1) Discover and translate customers' evolving needs then cater to them.

Example: Listen, then publish useful information that prompts questions that your products answer. Nurture sales with content marketing.

Action item: Make everything you do in Facebook, blogging, video, Twitter, etc. create a behavior that elicits an insightful response on customer need. Begin prompting customers to “signal” what they're most interested in, when, where and why. Take action on each response.

2) Design marketing processes to guide empowered customers toward destinations they choose -- your products/services. Architect behavioral processes that exploit classic direct response tactics.

Action item: Start publishing useful, relevant tools and information that fit customers' shopping context -- give them a means to offer you insights on problems your products/services can help them solve.

3) Become so useful customers turn to you first, out of habit.

Examples: Whole Foods Market's mobile application that helps shoppers crate a meal based on food they've already got on-hand at home. Tesco's mobile application that caters to wine aficionados desire to immediately buy a new discovery while tasting it at a friend's party or a restaurant -- simply by taking a photo of the label.

Action item: Ask yourself, “What problem can we offer a clever, unorthodox or novel solution to? Might this give us an excuse to talk about our product in creative ways that bring value to customers? Or stay in touch with customers in ways that allow us to prompt more behaviors?” (ie. prompt inquiries, generate leads)

Remember: Blog, tweet, post to solve customers' problems -- not offer discounts, gain attention, "engage" or share your "culture. Swim against the tide.

We recently a published comprehensive article that answers the following question: How do you measure success for your social marketing campaigns?
We strongly believe that SMM campaigns are no different than conventional marketing campaigns, except in the "How" side of the equation.

You need to subdivide your social media campaign into stages and measure each stage on its own:
Brand awareness - lead generation - prospects - sales
For more details on how to measure your success in each phase, you may check out the article:
http://garious.com/blog/2011/04/why-bother-measuring-your-social-media-campai...

I'm a numbers guy but I also know that most companies are missing the whole point of social media. Some of the most powerful benefits can't be applied to a spreadsheet. Stuff like:

Competitive intelligence
New product ideas
Recruiting
PR
Brand awareness
Customer engagement and loyalty
Better customer service
New business partners

... the list of potential business benefits goes on and on. If you can measure the ROI, great. But also rememeber that qualitative measures often may tell the story of social media return more appropirately than numbers.

Determine what you are trying to do first - have established business goals and clear metrics you are looking for, then determine what strategies and tactics will help you achieve the goals. These strategies and tactics may or may not be social. If they are social, think hard about how to broaden your definition of metrics from the traditional captured analytics from an Omniture, Google analytics, etc. (page views, time on site, etc.) to others, for example, a Facebook like. If you are measuring a Facebook like and other similar social measures, be sure to define what the like means from a business perspective (besides getting as many "likes" as possible to impress your social media peers). What will you do to keep the community that “liked” engaged after the initial like? What is the conversion? When and how will the conversion happen? Ultimately, the best conversion, in most cases, is a sale. However, if there is a long timeline to sale, think about more practical conversions like the download of a whitepaper, the participation in a webinar etc. Work with your pipeline, which may be beyond your group to determine how these measures will be captured and reported on before the campaign is in market.

Hi Caty,

I hate to give a difficult answer, but as Mark pointed out, ROI can mean a lot of different things with social media. This is because social media is not just about marketing: It's about sales, business development, public relations, recruiting, customer service, et. al.

One of my social media strategy consulting clients was a large software company who wanted to get their product FAQs discovered in social media. They were part of the Customer Service organization. One of the metrics they looked at was obviously more website hits where the digital assets were hosted. There was no "conversion."

Businesses make investments to either increase sales or decrease expenses. But there are a lot of "cost centers" that have to be part of a company which may not generate revenue yet still utilize social media to be more effective as in the case above.

It all comes down to a holistic approach to social media.

We have already stopped asking what the ROI of having a website is. I believe that same day will come soon for social media as well, as companies will start to realize they need to be where their customers are.

As some others here have mentioned, make sure you are clear about what ROI means for your company and your efforts. Is it total number of sales? Or sales ready leads? Or is it time saved by customer support not having people wait in a phone queue.

But ultimately, to really be effective, and get results, you need to do diligence. You need to know your buyer inside-and-out, and you need to understand how they consume content. Social media comes through many forms now, so what formats are they most comfortable with, and at what stages of the buying cycle do they want what content?

These are the kinds of questions you should be asking yourself, and hopefully have the answers to before you get started, but they are also questions that you can use social media to answer.

At the end of the day, the most important thing is that you're on the same page as your buyer, if you're asking the right questions, and engaging them the way they'd like to be engaged, you can count on ROI.

Use a call to action!!! Here is a relevant blog on this issue: http://www.barcode.com/how-to-increase-response-to-your-qr-code-by-500.html
Simply doing social media promotion is not enough.

To build on the other great comments, especially Mark's and Neal's, it's important to distinguish between long-term and short-term objectives. Brand-building and reputation, for example, are long-term objectives that may be tough to measure success in over the short term. It's much easier to specify and measure the ROI for specific, short-term campaigns and initiatives (e.g., conversion to sales from a Facebook or Twitter offer). Organizational leaders should indeed think about how they can get a return on their social media investments, but they shouldn't assume there's "one best way" to measure ROI.

Less and less people use Facebook today because of smartphones, and as a result they click to less pages.

The newest way is to engage people back online in offline situations, where they are using their smartphone.

QR codes are the vehicle to make that happen.

Here are 20 Ideas as social media evolves into mobile media and QR Codes: http://www.mcloughlin.ca/insights/20qrcodeideas