I m sure that everyone’s heard of Return on Investment (ROI) but have you heard of Return on Engagement (ROE)???
Today I’m going to talk about the concept of Return on Engagement and present some ways you can use to measure it.
Let’s have a look at social media usage statistics 2011
- 750 million Facebook users are building their social identities and connecting with others (Facebook statistics, 2011)
- 200 million Twitter users are sharing thoughts, links and information (White, 2011, September 16)
- 7.5 million people are “checking in” on Foursquare(Yarow, 2011, March 8)
- Over 3 billion videos are viewed a day and 100 million people take a social action on YouTube (likes, shares, comments, etc) every week (Youtube statistics, 2011)
Nowadays people don’t just search these social networking sites for people; they also look for many other things including products, services, brands and companies. The reasons is that they are looking for coupons, exclusive discounts or chances to win. Furthermore, they are interested in what other people are saying and what companies are saying back. Thus, it is critical for companies to understand how to benefit from engaging with their customers.
Through using these social networking sites, companies can build relationships with their friends, fans and followers and potentially make them become their newest customers. Moreover, companies can create some interesting activities in order to give their customers something fun and exciting to talk about is that they will do just that—share it with their friends and spread the world, and that’s what companies want.
After all, we all want results, numbers and measurements of traffic. Well, by using these platforms, companies can get as specific as they want, providing offers and prizes for “fanning” a page, “re-tweeting” a phrase, checking in at a store location and more. From here it becomes as simple as monitoring the buzz. We call this ROE, return on engagement.
There are some ways marketers can use to measure ROE as follows:
#1: Use a URL shortener like bit.ly to show how much traffic you are driving and from where.
#1: Use a URL shortener like bit.ly to show how much traffic you are driving and from where.
#2: Follow your tweets and retweets on Twitter to see how far they travel http://tweetreach.com/
#3: Track positive, negative and neutral along with # of comments posted on your sites
#4: Read “calculating the ROI of blogging” http://bit.ly/Z6xqP
#5: # of RSS subscribers and your repeat traffic (demonstrates loyalty)
#6: Develop specific tactics which improve your ranking on popular search engines
#7: Remember traditional methods like polls and surveys to get results.
#8: Keep track of what topics/issues/conversations
#9: Measure customer satisfaction via social media, take a quick pulse to see where you stand.
#10: Track # of people recommending, whether it’s a RT, “like,” “favorite,” which results in new members of your community
#11: Determine your “share of conversation” vs. your competitors http://bit.ly/Gjxgg
Source: PRSarahEvans, 2009
#3: Track positive, negative and neutral along with # of comments posted on your sites
#4: Read “calculating the ROI of blogging” http://bit.ly/Z6xqP
#5: # of RSS subscribers and your repeat traffic (demonstrates loyalty)
#6: Develop specific tactics which improve your ranking on popular search engines
#7: Remember traditional methods like polls and surveys to get results.
#8: Keep track of what topics/issues/conversations
#9: Measure customer satisfaction via social media, take a quick pulse to see where you stand.
#10: Track # of people recommending, whether it’s a RT, “like,” “favorite,” which results in new members of your community
#11: Determine your “share of conversation” vs. your competitors http://bit.ly/Gjxgg
Source: PRSarahEvans, 2009
Let’s give them something to talk about. Let’s also talk about it with them.
What do you think about ROE? How does your company measure engagement via social media?
It is a great idea for business advertisements. If their consumers do have a good discussion about how good their products are and how crazy they love to use them.
ReplyDeleteHowever, what if some comments or re-tweets are negative? How should the company response? Should the company just delete the ‘bad’ tweet to kill a potential public relationship disaster? Or should the company get involved in and explain their side of the story and make things even more complicated and well-known?
I just think that all tools can both benefit and harm their users. We should not always consider the benefit of the social media...
You have some great pointers here and I agree, ROI and ROE are important. It depends on what the objectives are for your SM strategy. If it is more about engagement and conversation, ROE is good, but at point you will need to get into the ROI side of things to see if your brand brand awareness is going up etc etc. In the end, even if you measure your ROE, something will have to come from that for the organisation.
ReplyDeleteRoss
Good post BTW.
thanks for your comments :)
ReplyDelete@Max: i got what u meant. your questions are quite challenging lol. in this case, the company shouldn't delete negative comments. The reason is that if they delete those negative comments, it is just such a bad way which leads to the loss of customer trust and damage their reputation.
There are few ways the company can use to deal with negative feedback, referring to the link http://mashable.com/2010/02/21/deal-with-negative-feedback/
furthermore, when the company gets involved in using SM, they need to prepare how to deal with any possible negative feedback from their customers. That s why ROE is very important for them to measure their customers' reaction.
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ReplyDeleteI think ROE is a useful way of evaluating social media outputs though the concept of ROE and how to measure it remain a bit fuzzy. As mentioned above, engaging is kind of creating a dialogue with people on social webs, thus without engagement social media ultimately fails. It is certain that every company wants to know what people are saying about its products or services and how much traffic exists around its brand. ROE therefore helps companies define as well as assess their social media strategies.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, thanks for the post, it's very helpful :)
Great post, Thi. To many of the “GURUS” out there are promoting numbers and not building relationships. We should be adding value to our followers. Thank you, the ROE has been very informative.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your response, Saint. The link is great. I guess if a company wants to promote itself through social media, it has to implement good SM policy, ensure the quality of its commercial deliverable and have reliable ROE tools to measure its customers' reaction.
ReplyDelete