The Business of Social Media and Making the ROI Case

Question 1: Let’s suppose your current annual sales are $1 million. You implement a social media strategy and begin generating $200,000 in revenue through your Facebook page. At the end of the year, your sales are till $1 million. Was your social media strategy successful? Why or why not.

It is very hard to say whether the social media strategy success or not. It is depending on from which angle you look into it. If is from Bottom Line revenue perspective, the social media strategy is not successful as when Facebook is generating revenue, other outlet/webpage’s revenue is declining and in the end, total annual revenue is not increasing.

However, other than revenues perspective, the social media strategy can consider as successful in line of having more analytics. We can gather invaluable information from other people to come out with better decisions. We can recognize our customer better in their preference. We can grouping up our target people by knowing who are the one really buying our product and who are just surfing for fun. This kind of information could not be measure by monetary value but is very important to the business’ future.

Furthermore, by having the social media strategy, we can increase our brand awareness and have better relationship with our customer. It is much important to know that how many people are talking about our business then how many revenue has increase. And when having facebook, we can easily connect with the customer and by having fun chat; the relationship between the organization and customer will increase.

Question 2: Every social media strategy costs money to implement, and we listed a few of those costs in this case study. Create more comprehensive list of social media strategy costs. Briefly describe each cost and indentify it as either a fixed cost or variable cost.

According to US market price, the social media strategy costs are listed down as below.

Fix cost:

      1.       Custom design and template creation : $1,000 -$5,000

      2.       Writing/Editing Content for the blog plus ongoing training: $500 -$4,000 per month

      3.       Account Setup: $500 - $ 2,000

      4.       Initial Page Setup: $500 - $2,500

      5.       Monthly Content Management and Creation: $500 - $3,000 per month

Variable cost:

      1.       Social Media Marketing teams : $5,000 - $10,000 a month

      2.       Social Media Consultants in-house team: $5,000 - $20,000 a month

      3.       Writing/Editing Content for the blog plus ongoing training $500-$4,000 a month

      4.       Ongoing Account Management and Training: $500-$3,000 a month

      5.       Ongoing Reports and Advisement: $500-$7,500 a month

      6.       Social Media Workshops: $500-$7,500 [Half-Day (Up to 4 hours)]

      7.       Social Media Speaker: $1,000-$5,000 one hour

Question 3: Suppose you have a successful business with a well-liked product. One day something goes wrong and you ship 100,000 defective products. Almost the entirety of your customer base is disgruntled. What social media strategy would you employ to help? Why? Would you be better off just “waiting for it to blow over” or even sticking your head in the sand”?

We will use strategy as below:

1) Social Listening

• Listening for conversations about our company, competitors and most import is those negative news

2) Social Conversation

• Finding and responding to conversations online – engaging with others in social media, explain to them the reality behind the story.

3) Social Marketing

• Giving warranties or replacement to those defective things.
• Launching and running campaigns and promotions in social media.

4) Social Analytics

• Measuring and analyzing results of social media efforts across various platforms

5) Social Influencer

• Identifying and engaging with influencers that are relevant to your company or industry.

**It is always the worst if we choose to sit and waiting for it to blow over. No matter what happen, face it is better than running away from it.

Question 4: In the case study, we listed five steps to success. Indentify two others and briefly describe them.

      

      1)      Strengthen Relationships

Attend offline events related to your industry—not only to strengthen your knowledge base but also to network and strengthen relationships with those you might have conversed with via social media but never met in person.

 2)       Measure Results

Since we have Goal and objective, we should measure it.

Four common measurements:

• Improve brand presence across social channels—The measurement goal here is an increase in the number of followers on Twitter, number of fans on Facebook, number of comments, number of times your brand is mentioned in blogs and forums and so on.
• Increase positive sentiment about your brand—The goal here is to convert the number of positive mentions while taking note of negative mentions.  Has the ratio of positive to negative comments improved?  With the good comes the bad in social media. Get used to it!
• Develop relationships for future partnership opportunities—This goal is to keep track of those with whom you’ve connected.  For example, if you met a potential speaker for your webinar, include that person into your digital Rolodex.  If a vendor contacts you through your blog, capture that lead and take note.
• Increase traffic to your website—Keep track of visitors to your website who come from each of your social media sites.  If you’re promoting an event using social media, consider using a unique code to track the campaign.