Maverick Growth Solutions

Some time back, we posted a video on Social Media called Socialnomics by Erik Qualman – author of the book by the same name. Now we have the second installment of videos resulting from the research that Qualman has conducted.

Click here to watch the video or continue to read and click the link at the end of this article.

This video demonstrates the value of Social Media answering the question that many business owners have, “Can Social Media benefit my business and provide a positive return on investment?”

To begin, we must define Social Media (for those that are unfamiliar with the term). Social Media is having a presence on the internet where people gather. These types of media are places like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo, LinkedIn, and a host of other sites. The most common comments we hear are things like, “I just don’t get Twitter.” and “How can I get any business from Facebook?”

Even though we can answer these questions with results, we recently answered theses questions from a personal experience. On a recent Sunday after church, we decided to take our families out for a Pizza Buffet. But, being frugal as we are, we were wondering what coupons were available from our favorite pizza restaurant. We simply visited their Twitter profile and in about a minute, we had our answer, knew which paper had the coupons, and were cutting those coupons out to go to lunch. Without the quick use of Twitter, we probably would have searched for the coupons for 30 minutes or so. Plus, if we couldn’t have found the coupons, we probably would have gone to a different restaurant that we had a coupon for. Twitter brought that pizza restaurant a sale that they otherwise would have missed.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been looking at different cell phone providers and in doing our research, we decided to “Become a Fan” of the Facebook Pages for each of the companies we were considering – and even some that we were not considering. This allowed us to connect with people making comments on those fan pages and read their comments (both positive and negative) to learn the good and the bad about each of the cell phone providers. The result? we ended up changing our cell phone provider. For less money than we were paying before, we now have unlimited minutes, text, and more internet time that we could possibly use in a give month. Oh, and did we mention, we didn’t have to buy new phones because the ones we had would work with this provider. At 9:06 PM, our phones were working on the original provider, and at 9:09 PM, the first phone had been changed over to the new provider – seamless and we didn’t have to stand in a store waiting to be helped.

Does Social Media work? Can it have a positive Return on Investment (ROI)? What do you think? For the cell phone company what was their investment? The had one of their employees (or their internet marketing company like us) establish their Facebook Fan Page and probably monitor it for comments. For the Pizza Restaurant, their internet marketing company established their Twitter page (and their Facebook account) and the marketing group feeds the info to their pages. Their investment was very small compared to their costs to market using traditional methods.

If you’ve not taken the time to watch the video yet, we encourage you to take just over four minutes to watch it now! Click here to watch the video You might be amazed at the facts revealed in the video.

2 Responses to “Social Media – Return on Investment”