This is the final part of this series. Enjoy the final two steps to strengthening your social media!
Step 5- Redefine ROI.
You can choose to look at Social Media’s ROI in traditional ways, and you will decide thatsocial media is a waste of time, relatively soon.That’s because you are not listing a singular ad, to see how much traffic is driven by that one ad.Let’s pretend you are throwing a large party this weekend, with over 100 guests.You invite 110 people, and 100 show.They stay for a couple of hours, and leave.Immediately after they leave, can you tell how successful the party was?You may try to judge by how much food or beverage consumption happened.You may try to gauge by how dirty the place is.But really, the only way to find out is to wait.See how many people you know are talking about the party a week from now.Was your party the party that all people use to define other gatherings?That’s how social media works.You do not have an immediate response.A successful social media campaign has customers that show up, mentioning ads you did months ago, and you are left wondering, “Where did these people come from?”
That’s not to say you cannot accurately measure the effectiveness of your campaign.It just means you need to change your analytics.One highly effective method is to judge how much traffic is happening at any time on your social sites that you did nothing to encourage.If people are visiting your social media sites, and you didn’t do anything to encourage them to visit at that moment, via some promotion, they are probably also buying from your store.There are ways of measuring ROI, but they are more long term, since they depend on social timing, not business timing.
One of the quickest ways of monitoring your ROI comes from Step 6.
Step 6- Have Watchful Eyes – Monitor Everywhere
“No news is good news” is not true.“Any press is good press” is a little more accurate.But only if you are working on monitoring every single thing anyone is saying about you.Imagine you are an automotive dealer.And a customer, waiting in your service area, tweets, “Could Imaginary Dealership waste any more of my time!!!”If you aren’t monitoring for this, you are sunk.This message is going out across cyberspace, to possibly thousands of potential customers.Now, imagine you are the same dealership, and you see that message, and immediately tweet back, “Let me fix it, right now.Come to the service desk.”And you fix the issue.And then you tweet, “All set?” to which the customer replies, “yes, thank you Imaginary Dealership!”Now there is a conversation out there, in cyberspace, going out to potentially thousands of customers, that you will do anything you can to help your people immediately.Capitalize on complaints publicly.Showing you are human and make mistakes doesn’t hurt your credibility.Fixing errors immediately, and going above and beyond to make things right builds customer satisfaction just as quickly as does doing it right the first time.
Let’s go out of the world of the internet for a minute.Have you ever been in a restaurant, where something came back not right?And you complained, and the manager came over immediately, fixed the problem, and gave you something for free, like dessert?Did you go back to the restaurant in the future?I know that this has happened to me, and I always went back at least once.Now, if every time I go, there’s something that gets done poorly, then the manager can give me free dessert for life, and I’m not going back.However, when the first error happened, and it was quickly addressed, corrected and I was compensated for their mistake, it cemented a positive experience in my mind.
How do you effectively monitor the entire world?You really can’t.But you can try.I’ve looked on a lot of facebook pages, and seen the comment sections blocked, or monitored.When I’ve asked the business owner why this is, I’ve been told that they do not want negative things written about them on their own site.My response is always, “So, you’d prefer negative things written about you on sites you don’t know about?” Stuffing your fingers in your ears, and singing, “La la la la la, I can’t hear your complaints!” probably wouldn’t help your business if you did it in front of a customer when he or she has an issue.The same is true when you shut down avenues where customers can communicate.Your goal for facebook should be that if someone wants to complain about you, they come right to your site to do it.That way you can address the issue, and fix the customer’s problem right away.
The same is not quite true for Twitter.If you aren’t constantly searching Twitter, looking for your name, you don’t know if someone is complaining.It is a different climate on Twitter.Whereas people go to facebook to have conversations, people typically are on Twitter just to express.So they aren’t going to aim their complaints at you personally, which means you have to go find those complaints.Then follow the complainers, and see if you can start a conversation. Many times, you will use their profile on Twitter to find ways to communicate with them through other channels where a dialogue is easier to complete.
You have people that watch your location to make sure that there are not disgruntled customers roaming the store, complaining loudly to other potential buyers.You need to have people watching the internet to make sure there aren’t people doing the same thing.If you can capture a negative experience, and turn a customer around publicly, and sell that customer, there is proof positive of ROI.As one car dealership I worked with stated, “It was real easy to see the ROI when we had a displeased service customer, Tweeting, ‘I’m never working with (dealership) again! I hate this car, and I hate this place!’ and by monitoring social media, we stopped trying to fix the car, and sold her a new one.That’s powerful. Now we have a happy customer, we sold a car, and we have her positive press on Twitter instead of negatives.”
