5 Tools to Increase Your Social Media ROI

There’s a lot of hype around influence. Sure, there’s Klout, Peer Index and the like, and maybe they’ll figure it out and the metric for influence will become more valuable.

Pam Moore recently put it best in a comment on Social Media Today. She said (and I paraphrase)

“more than influence isn’t it the ROI that’s really important?”

Increasing your Social ROI is vital and you should be asking:

• Are you converting leads?
• Are you increasing following?
• Is your engagement going up?

These are the questions you must be asking yourself if you are to run a success social marketing campaign.

Here are 5 Tools to ensure you’re getting the maximum ROI from your social efforts, and improving your social conversions.

1. MarketMeSuite

Let’s start with the first element in any social campaign. The dashboard you use to bring all your efforts together. I co-founded MarketMeSuite in 2009, and it has grown into an absolute juggernaut of a marketing and social management tool. It takes the best elements of your favorite management platforms, mixes in geo-targeting and pro-active marketing, and gives you one giant place to share, schedule, auto-post RSS, and post in real time to Facebook at the same time as posting to Twitter and Linkedin. Imagine you’re a chiropractor. With MarketMeSuite you can actually geo-target a campaign just to 25 miles from your office. This type of geo-targeted tweeting is a tremendous time saver. As nice as it is to chat with someone with back pain in Norway, you need to fill your office in New York. MarketMeSuite enables you to convert social leads.

Investment: Free

ROI: The results are pretty staggering. Studying a cross section of our users, we found 85% of replies sent using reply campaigns method elicit a response.

2. Buffer

There is a science behind posting. Knowing where your customers are, and when is the best time to tweet is really important. You can do a lot of this manually in some of the full serviced dashboards, but what about when you’re on the net, and you see something that would be great to send out to your followers? With Buffer you can just click on the easy to install plugin and the message is queued up for times you choose when you can’t physically be there. These messages can go to Twitter and Facebook.

Investment: Free for up to 10 Tweets in your Buffer, then $10 to $99 a month depending on plan

ROI: It’s a simple concept, but sometimes simplicity works wonders. Based on some data they collected CTR on Tweets of links shared by Buffer increased by 200% after 3 weeks of regular use.

3. LiveFyre

One overlooked side of any social campaign is the ROI of a blog post through social media. You’re writing blog posts in the hopes that people read them, and by reading them they will be more connected to you and what you sell. So I’m about to give you some important advice: If you don’t have a decent commenting plugin installed on your blog, don’t waste another second. In fact, don’t even read to the end of this post. Go right now and try LiveFyre. It’s free, and it’s taken social commenting to a new level. Users are more engaged with the story, tweeting out their comment is a breeze, and it really facilitates discussion on the blog, AND across Twitter and Facebook. In one easy click you can send a message saying “You were just mentioned in this conversation…” with a link back to the blog post.

Investment: Free

ROI: Perpetuating a conversation gives your blog post a longer life, and if you can manage to get it into the social media sphere, you can harness that inherent virality that comes with it. I installed it on the MarketMeSuite blog about a month ago, and commenting has doubled.

4. Constant Contact

Don’t forget about old school e-mail marketing. Creating newsletters and e-mail campaigns is still as important is it was pre-social media, but now you get a social return on investment for each piece of email marketing you send. Constant Contact has a social sharing feature, so you can share your email across Twitter and Facebook in one click. They also recently acquired Bantam Live and are promising more social integrations soon.

Price: Starts at $15.00 a month depending on use, free trial.

ROI: They make it real easy to see the social impact of a campaign. When you check your analytics in the Constant Contact dashboard it says “You’ve gone social” and it tells you which network and how often the message was shared.

5. TwitSprout

Twitsprout is one page social analytics. Currently in beta, it offers a decent insight into how you are doing on Twitter. It shows follower growth by day, hourly change in following, growth rate increase/decrease and follow are list ratio.

Price: Free for basic analytics. Custom Branded reports, contact for quote.

ROI: Twitsprout showcases the important metrics to measure whether your social interactions driven by tools mentions above are doing their jobs, at least on Twitter. Currently data is only related to Twitter.

Key Take Away

Make sure your focus on is what you get for the time you put into something — The ROI. There’s a lot of free tools out there, but time is money. When you get social marketing right, the return on investment can be huge. I hope this list has helped you, and please let me know any other tools you’ve found useful.

About the author: Tammy Kahn Fennell is the  CEO of MarketMeSuite, the social media marketing dashboard.You can connect with her on Twitter @Tammykfennell

More Reading

• 8 Great Twitter Tools that will get You Tweeting Like a Pro
• 5 Tools to Measure Your Social Media Success
• 6 Powerful Tools to Find Your Customers on Twitter
• 25 Facebook Marketing Tips to Increase Sales

Image by KeithBurtis