Tapping social media capital

The popularity of social media cannot be debated but it is important for any online enterprise to understand how to make use of multiple social media channels and more importantly, what is the return on investments in the forms of time and money.
While the majority of Internet marketers have been busy utilising digital advertising, SEO, PPC and other online tools to promote their businesses, others have been using and benefiting from social media long before trend watchers predicted user-generated content to have a profound impact on businesses. Savvy marketers are going a long way to gain access to additional audiences and a deeper reach into existing communities through social media channels.
Earlier this year, two studies have been released and both show totally opposite findings. As per the 2011 Industry Report from Social Media Examiner, “90 per cent of more than 3,000 Web marketers say that social media is an important facet of their business today. Brand exposure was identified as the greatest benefit, with 88 per cent respondents citing it as positive for social media campaigns.” On the other hand, research released by ForeSee Results states, “on average, less than one per cent of website visits come directly from a social media URL. ForeSee surveyed 300,000 consumers on more than 180 websites across multiple industries to come up with that number, which sounds like an awfully poor return on a company’s investment of both time and resources.” So, go for social media or not is the question.
When it comes to social networking, there are literally hundreds of services available – Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Plus, to name just a few. In fact, any site that allows conversational interaction is a prime venue for the rapidly growing fields of social media. With millions of users and billions of monthly page views, no business, large or small, can ignore social media anymore. More businesses are joining the fray every day and the social media crowd is not as young as you may think. Increasingly, businesses are stepping up, establishing their own profiles, and promoting them in the social media population. There are certainly some challenges in social media promotion in local context, but the benefits are evident and abundant.
What are the benefits and can they actually be measured? This is one of the most common questions among marketing folks and the other side – the one who pays for marketing efforts. Let me say that there are no numbers in social media game. And let me confess that social media is hard to be measured in plain numbers. The fact that social media marketing return on investment (ROI) is hard to measure is another reason that has prevented many businesses to jump on social media board. There are some analysts out there who argue that it is possible to measure social media marketing ROI, but what they are measuring is no actually ROI as such. ROI is literally a monetary measurement. Counting how many blog comments, Facebook fans, Twitter followers and retweets and friends in Google Plus circles a business gets is possible but that is not really measuring ROI since none of these things specifically correlate with the amount of leads a business gets.
That does not mean that social media does not contribute to the bottom line. It certainly does. Social media is a great way to attract and hold attention and build relationships with potential customers, clients, prospects, and other stakeholders. A lead may generate from corporate blog, via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Google Plus or vice versa.
Best would be to you utilise as many social media channels that are available and use them all together because no one can say what will prompt consumers to make buying decisions. Putting all social media efforts together and effectively managing social media operations can earn any business significant social capital. Social capital as per Pierre Bourdieu – a French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher – ultimately contributes to economic capital.

The writer is Deputy Controller of Examinations at Lahore School of Economics. He blogs at http://logicisvariable.blogspot.com/ and can be reached at [email protected]