ROIAL Social Media

As discussed before, social media is important for companies - very important!
As a social media manager, it is important to know, what is achieved with social media. The most important figure is ROI, Return on Investment = (final value - starting value)/starting value.

Now, I am going to present three tools which help to measure ROI:
1) Baselines: Powerful tool, for example to display changes through the use of social media.
+ Very easy to understand + Development over time + Flexible, can be used for different variables/contexts -  Often relative rather than absolute numbers

2) Activity timeslines, which list different activities connected to social media on a timeline.
+ As the name says, activities can be followed over time + development and updates can be tracked - not quantified - needs other tools to see, if activities lead to results

3) Sales revenue chart: Displays sales revenues on a timeline, for example per month or per day.  Can be linked to social media activities.
+ Sales revenues really matter to the upper management + Easy to understand + Development over time - Needs other tools to be linked to social media efforts.

There are more tools which can and should be used to measure the ROI of social media. Then, the measures are combined in order to create a "big picture" of social media ROI which covers various aspects.

Tools which can be used in order to do the whole analysis or to support the ROI analysis are, for example:
- Google Analytics - Omniture -TweetMeme Analytics -PostRank Analytics -HootSuite.

Yours,
Matthias