Vive le ROI!

France doesn’t have a king anymore. If it did, the phrase would hold more modern significance. However, if you pronounced that last word as “are-oh- eye” instead of “gwah,” you’re more likely to hit something modern and quite relevant to online marketing.

So, you want to know about ROI on social media? How far your fan page dollars go? Exactly how much cake you shall eat? Of course you do. It’s why hundreds of companies have empty fan pages, established but unused and unadministered. It’s why thousands of companies (though now quite a minority) have yet to jump in at all. And it’s why everyone’s wondering just how much money the Coca Colas and Nikes of the social media world are actually making with their fan pages.

I can’t give you your potential ROI, or even a way to determine it. But I can give you a few tidbits that may turn out to be quite filling.

1) You can acquire data ever so easily.
It’s the Internet, silly! Market research has been an intense and expensive business for years, but with your Facebook fan page (and especially with many of the applications that you can add), you are automatically fed usage data – metrics and analytics that can give you at least a general idea of your fan page’s impact.

2) It’s hard to be pessimistic about ROI when the “I” itself is of Napoleonic stature – low.
Fan pages and other social media are freely available, but you must know that they aren’t free – unless you can find volunteers to keep your content fresh, communicate with customers, and so on. But compared to the planning, production, and implementation costs of direct advertising, it really is small peas. So unless your social media efforts never take off at all, the cost will be worth it.

3) Social media shouldn’t stand alone.
Every marketing technique has its place, from newspaper advertising to lasers on the moon. Social media, too, has strengths and weaknesses – fan pages exemplify this by providing a “catalytic hub” for social media activity. They’re not good for widespread brand exposure, but they’re great for engaging your most loyal customers and giving them a platform from which to laud you in public. So don’t just set up a fan page, guillotined it from the rest of your marketing, and try to count every penny it earns you. Launch it as part of your integrated marketing strategy, and you’ll see the ROI debate in a whole new light.

4) You’re not the only one – answers, we hope, are coming.
In fact, just recently, Nick O’Neill reported Facebook’s newest branding salvo: “Brand Lift,” a partnership with Nielsen (of television marketing research fame) to provide instant market research results for online advertisers. Here’s his take on the deal:
http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/09/brand-lift-facebooks-answer-to-the-brand-advertising-conundrum/