Every company would like to deliver positive ROI, and for senior management to increase support we must be able to deliver a measure of overall business performance through ROI calculations. Unfortunately, social media programs do not stand alone. They are a component of an overall communication effort. To fully understand business improvement via social, we must have a broader picture, and integrate social media metrics with other measures of business performance. Once this is built, our clients have a complete framework to consistently delivery social media programs with measured outcomes that can be tied to business performance.

At this stage our clients are asking themselves:

• If I increase my social media investment by $X, I expect to increase my website traffic from key sites by Y%. Z% of those people will add to their shopping carts and this will mean total additional sales of $X+$Q.
• If I can create a community where X% of my customers can resolve their own issues, then I can decrease my call center costs by Y% and save $Z.
• My media budget is $X million and expects to reach a target audience of Y million people. If I allocate 5% of the media cost to a social media campaign and it goes viral, I can reach a target audience of two times Y.

To learn more about what steps you should take and outcomes you can expect click the organization needs and see a sample objectives matrix we build for clients.