3 Essential Tips To Drive Your Social Media ROI

By Lori Moriarty, Account Marketing Analyst, Televerde

Social media is growing up. In the past you may have had an intern or a recent college grad running the Twitter account and sending out updates. In a recent infographic by WebDAM, social media marketing budgets will double over the next five years. Now, we know there is some real value in social media. The information floating out there in social media can be used to help you sell more. And that is the ROI of social.

Here are three essential tips to drive your social media ROI:

Get a grip on social. Take a look at social media from a pure strategy perspective. It needs to be woven into the company culture. Entangle your social strategy and every activity online into your overall marketing plan. Once you get your social plan in action, you will be saying the right things, at the right times, to the right people. Establish a clear overall strategy and then execute on it.

What’s their social perception? Remember that in social, every single component of your company is affected by the perception online. Social ties into sales, support, recruiting, and service. You will need to establish corporate policies to manage the online melee that includes how to deal with an upset customer, a missed service call, or a bad interview experience ahead of time. Social is not just a marketing tool; it’s something that needs to be threaded throughout the entire culture of the company.

There is no bad publicity in social. If you have your social plan in place effectively, you will always know when people are happy or not so happy with you. This is a great thing to know. If you have an unhappy customer, quickly respond, fix it, and follow up. Most customers who are mad at companies because they feel like they were ignored or that their expectations weren’t met. With the power of social, you can turn a negative experience into a positive one very quickly. Oftentimes these once disgruntled customers become your best source of good PR. They spread the word about how you reacted and went above and beyond to fix the problem. Now that’s good PR.

It is time to revamp the social media model to create an entirely new media plan. Use social as an integral part of marketing so your organization is delivering the right message to the right people at the right time. Every part of the organization is affected by social media. Think of it this way, if there are people and they can have an opinion then social media applies. Use smart marketing with social media to drive revenue by delivering the right message, within company policy.

This article originally appeared on the Televerde Blog.

How does your organization incorporate social into your integrated marketing plan and still keep a unified message? What have been your challenges in implementing right policies for social? Join the conversation @televerde by using #DriveSocialMediaROI or let us know your thoughts on LinkedIn.