Social Media ROI: How about an increase in revenue?
July 20, 2009 by Michael Brito
Ask anyone in senior management about ROI and social media and the common response will surely be “Show Me the Money”. Unless you are Dell and selling products directly from one of their many Twitter accounts, it can prove to be a difficult task to attribute a hard ROI to just about any social media engagement.
Charlene Li just released a study that correlates consumer brand engagement in social media and financial performance and the results tell a unique story. In a nutshell, the more “authentic” participation by a brand in social media, the higher their revenue gain. This is huge news, especially for brands who are struggling to get buy in from senior management.
Each brand was given a numerical score based on certain criteria:
- Starbucks (127)
- Dell (123)
- eBay (115)
- Google (105)
- Microsoft (103)
- Thomson Reuters (101)
- Nike (100)
- Amazon (88)
- SAP (86)
- Tie – Yahoo!/Intel (85)
I am very excited about these results considering I work for Intel and I am responsible for one on one interaction with consumers people.I encourage you to read the full report and share it with your friends and colleagues. Could this be a wake up call for brands to start taking social media more seriously? I hope so.
Feel free to follow me on Twitter or see what I am up on my social media blog.
Social media is an affordable + accurate listening/ research tools, making profit should not really the main goal for it.
Social media should be used to engage/ communicate with the target crowd (like what Dell does), and listen to consumers’ voice at the same time instead of ONLY focusing on making profits. For long term, profit only grows when foundation is built correctly.
It should be run with a well-planned strategy, not by tactics.
excellent point; but there has to be business goals associated with any social media engagement.
Social media can be used as a means to profit – as a research tool.