Here's Why You Don't Need An ROI To Know Social Media Works
Social media works. If you have a brand and you want to grow it, make more people aware of it, sell more of your products and your services and use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat or any of the others to do it you certainly can if you know what you’re doing or the person you hire knows.
Now, is it a cut and dried proposition? Nope. Can you get a nice neat and completely accurate ROI on it that would pass a college 400 level statistics class with a t-statistic or whatever? Kinda maybe…..not sure. I hated stats. Is a social media strategy and getting results from it simple? In some ways yes but in many ways no - and let me elaborate on that last part for just a sec:
Simple but…..not
It’s simple from the standpoint of mindset - be helpful, responsive, valuable and engaging, honest, creative and fun and you can go far. That mindset should be simple if you get it. That’s the “yes” part of the answer. However, the social networks can be notoriously difficult to navigate and just when you think you’ve got them down they change the rules, tweak the algorithm, rearrange the user interface or just take stuff away with no warning - DAILY. That’s the “no” part.
Now assuming you can navigate those (I’ve covered much of that elsewhere), let’s get back to the question of whether it works - and the ROI thing that many corporate types crave to justify their spend and cover their backsides…
But does it WORK?
I’m here to tell you that true ROI has always been a little elusive with social, that it ALWAYS will be, and that it’s okay - you DON’T need it to know social media still works. I’ve got a couple of examples to prove it.
I won’t inundate you because there are many I could use. We’ll start with this one from Five Guys Burgers and Fries - Michigan. It was a comment that a potential customer made that I responded to:
I posted a photo of a burger and it prompted someone who saw it in their newsfeed to chime in and ask if there was a Five Guys in Muskegon or Holland. A quick reply letting him know that there were indeed Five Guys locations in BOTH Muskegon AND Holland was valuable for this person, and he replied “awesome had no idea”. This happens quite often and so we know we are converting some new fans - that’s proof without knowing the bottom line ROI. For all I know he went there with his wife and 5 kids and his sister brought her 4 kids as well for dinner and they spent $150 that day. Maybe they’ll make that their Friday dinner ritual and spend 8000 dollars this year. Maybe he’ll just go by himself 5 times this year and spend $60. Maybe he won’t tell us either way what he does. Maybe there’s another person who saw this exchange and discovered Five Guys through it but didn’t comment and never says a peep about how it’s his new favorite place. We can’t track all of these people and we can’t possibly measure it.
Now if business increases across all 30 locations in Michigan in the year that we added social media can we attribute some of that success to social media? Well sure - that seems fair and not some total coincidence. But can we really quantify how much?
There are specific examples that on a micro level may be more revealing. We targeted the city of Mt. Pleasant for months ahead of the opening of a new location there with boosted posts and we can measure that opening week’s sales against other opening week’s sales in other markets from before without social media campaigns. The early results in sales are good enough that coupled with the very obvious and palpable buzz that we built there over the course of the last year we can safely assume that a good chunk of the revenue that was generated over and above the goals came from the sustained campaign on Facebook.
That example is more of a direct result - a clear return on the investment in social media. And don’t get me wrong - I’m not saying you shouldn’t measure your results - you absolutely should. But once again I can’t quantify the overall success of the Five Guys Michigan page down to the dollar. Now I don’t have a traditional advertising background and I don’t know how ad salespeople attempt to prove ROI from a TV commercial for example and maybe I’m exposing a weakness in showing my hazy understanding of how some of this works. But what I do know is how to build a community on social media, and I know social media works. It’s obvious to me and it’s obvious to my client in this case even if I’m too busy creating content and kicking butt to spend all my time crunching numbers going into analysis paralysis… and frankly that’s what matters to me.
You don’t need rocket science for something that isn’t.
You can see the difference between an energized and engaged community that likes, comments and shares your content and a community that produces crickets…. Make sure you’re not producing crickets like so many brands do by just posting bland sales pitch garbage that no one could ever be consistently interested in. It might not be quite as simple as an eyeball test, but at the core that’s kind of what this is. It certainly isn’t rocket science.
A couple more examples.
Here are a couple other quick ones:
Orchard Mall - you can see engagement picking up and growth on the page, and I actually had someone approach me in a Kroger and say “Hey you’re the Orchard Mall guy on Facebook!” because I’ve done some community-facing livestreaming for that brand. ROI there is going to be impossible because for starters no one buys anything from the Orchard Mall - they buy things from the stores IN the Orchard Mall. True ROI will be impossible but the content is impactful enough that random strangers have stopped me in a grocery store. Yes - that’s how we know it’s working.
Super Car Wash - same thing. People are chiming in on the “My First Car Monday” series we do each week, and people have asked when we’re bringing back “Car Care and Repair With Kenny” which was a series we were doing. I don’t chase down those people and ask how many times they’ve taken their car to the car wash or stop to take notes on how often the content has prompted them to do it. These interactions just happen in passing offline.
Frameable Faces Photography - tons of chatter offline since that’s MY business with my wife Ally and the one that the two of us together are most closely associated with in the content. People give me specific examples of things they’ve seen all the time - people who don’t even comment or give any indication that they are watching. But they are - and they’re talking about us. If there’s a way to properly measure that I don’t know what it is - and don’t reach out to me with some formula, because really - I don’t care. I just know it works.
Not everyone can get their mind around this. Not everyone is willing to take leaps of faith with their business, especially if they aren’t Internet savvy, and that’s fine. Be the savvy one and get the upper hand on the ones who aren’t by not being hung up on a traditional ROI for everything you do.
What do you think? Do you agree? Are you ready to lecture me on why you DO need an ROI? BRING IT!!! Hehe… feel free to comment below!
M10 Social is owned by Doug Cohen in West Bloomfield, MI and provides social media training and digital marketing services from the Frameable Faces Photography studio Doug owns with his wife Ally. He can be reached there at tel:248-790-7317, by mobile at tel:248-346-4121 or via email at mailto:doug@frameablefaces.com.
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