Hello and welcome back it’s Social Media Sean here. The other day I was watching one of my favorite movies – Jerry Maguire. You know that scene where Tom Cruise is yelling at the top of his lungs “Show me the Money!”? Well it really got me thinking that more than ever business owners and executives alike are searching on a quest to find out the direct relation between their social investment and the ROI – the return on investment. One of the big challenges that they’re facing in measuring this is that directly there is no ROI associated with social media.

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Now let me explain what I mean by that. What I mean is that social media itself – digital media that we share online that we have conversations around and social networks themselves aren’t actually going to bring us any additional revenue. Where the revenue is going to come from is our business plan, our business strategy.

Social media is an extension of that strategy. Not only that, we can’t just be ‘partly social’ for us to think that it’s going to work and to be able to effectively measure the ROI. Social media has to be part of our organization – right from Sales to Marketing, HR – the recruiting part of it, our internal communications and how we run our business.

When we look at it as a whole, no longer are we looking for this “short term amazing impact” that social media is going to have – because it’s not like that. Any business that’s been around for a long time, knows that we have to think long term when we’re doing our marketing plan – in order to really see lasting results. Social media is no different. Yes, there is a ton of money to be made through social media if you’re implementing the right strategies behind it.

There’s a lot of people doing some really great things out there. The one thing we need to keep in mind is that we are all in the people business. What that means is that we need to go to where the people are – and the people are on social media. Not just through their business but they’re living hours and hours of their lives on these networks.

When we really learn how to define who our customer is and how they act online, then we can really start to connect with them and have some lasting relationships. That is when we can really start to look at the return on not only the investment, but of the return on the relationship.

Those are my thoughts on the ROI of social media,  “showing me the money”. Hope you guys have an awesome day! Thanks for stopping by.