Social media for business is very difficult to understand for marketers. It’s been quite a mystery to understand on why online ad networks give more ROI then a Social platform. What a marketers doesn’t seems to understand here is that social media platform and an online advertisement platform are two different things. They function differently are built and applied in different way. And when you are thinking ROI they surely are different worlds.ROI in monetary terms cannot be delivered by social media.But this doesn’t mean that social media cannot be used for Business it’s got more juice and potential than any other promotional vehicle when it comes to real-time and interactive marketing.

Social media is a media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Whereas Online advertising is promotion that delivering marketing messages to attract customers and to attract the right customer the SEO, keyword relevancy are crucial and thus begins the game of CPC, CPM, and CPA etc.

What one needs to understand is that all the social media platforms first of all are not same. They have their own DNA (I mean generally) and based on this the customer or user of the social platform differs so TG classification starts here.

Ok coming back to how social media platforms can be used, First of all consider this; a social media platform can only help you in

• Building Loyalty
• Getting feedback
• Word of mouth marketing
• Interactions
• Awareness

The catch:

In every discussion about social media for business you will find this debate about social media is not quantifiable those are human interactions they need different measure and so on. Point is you aren’t meant to use social media for marketing purpose because people there come for what the platform has to offer and not for advertisements etc(again do not do the online ad way you will lose on the customer eventually). Social media is about engagement and socializing so if you want to use it for promotions you will have to first start by understanding how the network works and not by what the publishing tool allows you to do.

The course:

Social media promotions takes time because it is more than conveying message it’s about promotional information architecture, focus driven applets and adaptive learning. It’s all about engagement. So you can quantify this cost of time with monetary spends of other promotional vehicles.

Returns:

If you were to align marketing activities with social media they would be promotional marketing, Brand building, Brand experience aid, Customer loyalty building exercise, advertising and interactive advertising direct communications etc would be inline factors.

• Reach
• Accessibility
• Usability
• Regency
• Permanence

Are general features of a social media platform. Remember you already have spends for these activities and ROI is not always the measure, measure should be if campaigns successfully caused target customers to commit to the goal some indicators can be social actions like rate, comment, share, recommend etc.

Considerations:

Once you know how the platform functions you can proceed to plan on how to use the platform with its available features and possibilities which in itself is a different proposition. Make sure you device a better engagement promotion plan which will deliver value to the users over time.

PS :no matter what, it’s still to be figured out. There is no social platform or module of its which has brand engaging module and delivers better business proposition. But what the heck I might be wrong because social modules and behaviors are difficult to predict only the platform owners can tell and decide how to maximize and optimize on marketing opportunity but the catch is they cannot overturn a social mechanism to business driven platform.