Other than search engines, social media has also become an important business tools for companies, especially in terms marketing and consumer relations. Having a strong presence in social media may require significant investment, in terms of money, effort and time. There should be a system that tracks leads and sales conversion related the corporate use of social media. There are different ways to ensure that ROI can be achieved more easily with social media, such by using automation software. Many companies started social media usage for improving connections within the company, between employees. It provided great benefits for internal usages. If your company has similar implementation, you need to shift the focus.

Eventually, you will find that social media is highly valuable for your external business goals and you will be interested to expand its usages. At this stage, you should have a method to calculate the proper ROI. Just like with websites, social media presence also depends on strong content strategy, so you will be able to attract and retain interested followers. If you bombard customers with tons of less meaningful content, it is possible that they will abandon your social media presence. When it comes to delivering content to social media, you need to implement the right balance. Ensuring a strong presence in social media can be quite expensive for smaller companies, especially if they want to have continued presence in LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

It is important for you to start establishing a system that can help to measure the proper ROI. This can be achieved much easier, if your company allocate a distinct budget for social media campaign. You will have a direct calculation on the actual amount of money used for social media presence. Of course, investment isn’t only seen from financial perspective. You also need to take into account the amount of effort and time to establish and maintain your presence in social media. By proper calculation, you should be able to estimate the monetary equivalent of effort and time spent. The man-hour unit can be used as an indicator to convert effort and time to monetary value, especially if we know how much an employee is paid for each working hour.

Finally, you need to determine results you get from the amount of money and man-hour units that you invest. Results can be easily quantifiable, such as leads and actual sales generated. Other results can be more difficult to quantify, such as new followers and the increased strength of your brand in social media. Again, you can still quantify these factors, although it’s not very accurate, but you can still get a general overview of results. As an example, you should look for the ratio of social media followers and sales. The ratio will change, but in many cases, you will have a general approximation of results. Determining ROI shouldn’t be considered as a rigid plan. It is important to remain flexible in your efforts and you will be able to predict ROI in a more accurate manner, although you are dealing with factors that are difficult to quantify.