Increase Social ROI with These 5 Social Media Tools
The term “Return of Investment,” or ROI, has always been the backbone of business. It’s a no-brainer as to why that’s the case. Simply stated, if you input some money into a project, business, or other endeavor, you are going to want to know how much cash you stand to get back in the long run. It’s always been relatively simple to recognize and pinpoint because it has always been how corporate success is measured.
Social ROI, or SROI, is a little different. The concept of measuring a business’s worth through non-financial metrics is old in nature, as it has been around since the first print ads cropped up. However, it’s modern execution and the way that most of us perceive it operating is relatively new, as social networks, review sites, and bloggers have conspired to place an emphasis on creating and maintaining buzz in the marketplace like never before. It also has caused a shift in philosophy of sorts; even if you are a successful business, if nobody is talking about you, it could be perceived that you aren’t as successful as you could be.
Because of this shift, it is more important than ever to dive into a social media tool to help drive your SROI onward and upward.
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The following five tools will allow you to do just that in a way that is modern yet approachable – which is exactly the kind of image that your business more than likely wants to create.
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We can all assume that a strong online presence helps the growth and the promotion of a particular brand. However, we may not fully be aware of how it works. And in the modern world of SROI, there are all kinds of moving parts that work together to allow a company to socially rise to the top – or sink to the bottom. These elements range from raw numerical data such as how many times your brand is getting named on Facebook to more personal information such as what exactly people may be saying about you. SproutSocial excels at providing you the breakdown of how your business is being received online. The service contains a host of analytical tools that allow you to pinpoint precisely what the mood of the masses is across all social media platforms when it comes to your business. Plus, SproutSocial can monitor your SROI the old-fashioned way, by providing progressive tools to help you refine and improve your actual relations with your clientele in real time, and not just through Tweets and Facebook Likes.
With all of the emphasis that is being concentrated toward Facebook, Twitter, and other 21st Century forms of social networking, it’s somewhat easy to overlook the power that e-mail can have in growing a business’s SROI. But make no mistake: It is still a mighty tool to use. After all, you are captivating an audience right when he or she clicks on that e-mail – something that is not necessarily true given the fleeting main page presence of a Tweet or Facebook post. And that is why Constant Contact is still a pretty vital service for you to use to build your SROI.
The company’s ability to allow you to create, shape, and customize your own newsletters and e-mail campaigns is well known. However, what may surprise even those that have used the service in the past is how the service now offers a cross-pollination of sorts between old and new social marketing tactics.Constant Contact’s social sharing capabilities allow you to not only send out your newsletter the old-fashioned way, but it will also generate social media blasts of the same document across Twitter and Facebook in one easy click. Afterward, the service provides you metrics so you can see just how viral your message went. That’s pretty progressive for a company that some may consider to be relatively old-school in nature.
One of the challenges in growing SROI lay within dealing with social media itself. Between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and whatever emerging social media application or website may be on the horizon, keeping up appearances on the various social media platforms seems like an overwhelming task at times – a task that you may feel distracts you from performing other essential business duties.
However, HootSuite is specifically designed to manage your social media outlets in a way that makes it appear that you are on top of everything, all the time. Hootsuite’s tools allow you to schedule Twitter Tweets, monitor feeds and manage events posted on Facebook, enhance recruitment tactics on LinkedIn, and generally make it look like you have a tireless, almost all-seeing online presence. Through Hootsuite, people will be aware of you because you will demonstrate that you are aware of the power of social media.
In a way, Twitter and Facebook is a study in scientific behavior. In order to maximize their benefits, you need to be fully aware of who your customers are, when they are active online, and when they are the most receptive to tweets. Once you figure out these metrics, you can hatch a basic social network strategy that is built around your findings. However, there will undoubtedly be times where you will see something that you absolutely want to share with your audience, but you see it at a time when it would be completely impractical for you to send out a social media blast.
That’s where Buffer comes in. The tool helps elevate your SROI by allowing you to upload all the relevant, cool things you want to share with your perspective audience to its service and scheduling when exactly you want your message blasted. This practice obviously makes Buffer an important SROI building tool, but it also helps to somewhat reduce your stress level.
Think about it: How many times have you been surfing the web, came across something cool that you want to share with someone, yet you don’t have time to do it right then and there? Out of those times, how often have you proceeded to spend way too much time trying to wrack your brain remembering where to find that very same photo, web page, or other miscellaneous web-based item?
You know something like that can be rather annoying to deal with; if the item in question has something to do with your business, then it becomes even more troublesome. Based on that scenario, it’s safe to say that Buffer can offer peace of mind as well as the ability to schedule tweets on the fly.
Making sure you have a blog that is associated with your company website is more important than ever, partially because it enables you to grow your SROI in a unique way. Rather than blasting out news at 140 characters or less or on a Facebook post that may be buried in a feed after a couple of hours, a blog will allow you to go into depth and detail about the aspects of your business that you wish to share with your existing and future customers in a way that feels more permanent. However, there has traditionally been one drawback to this kind of SROI platform: That is, it a pretty weak performance record in connecting the blogger and the audience through comments and other means of social interaction. This very reason is why LiveFyre is absolutely worth exploring.
The social media tool enables a plug-in to work with your blog that essentially allows the comments section to operate like a familiar social media site like Twitter or Facebook. Additionally, the plug in has the power to send out any comments made on the post through those two social media titans. This instantly makes the blog post a much more social place for the audience to be, because the conversation that is generated from the blog will be allowed to carry over to places where conversation of the online variety naturally occurs. And if you are the author of the blog, isn’t that kind of SROI exactly the kind of thing that you want to achieve?
The very existence of these tools proves a couple things about the way we conduct business in the 21st century. First and foremost, the social elements of business as they relate to technology have never been more vital. In other words, Twitter and Facebook aren’t exactly going to cease to be relevant any time soon. Secondly, SROI will only increase its stature as a viable, important metric. You can figure this out by the number of emerging social media tools that are designed to drive up SROI numbers.
However, you can also figure out their relevance by observing its natural connection that SROI has with the traditional ROI metric. After all, the more that people are aware of your business and what it has to offer them, the more potential customers you have, which could eventually turn into more paying customers. And ultimately, that uptick in clientele will go a long way into showing off your measure of success.
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