class 2 - ROI

What are three different methods to measure ROI of social media marketing?

First of all and before starting to measure your ROI of social media marketing you should establish a baseline from which you start measuring your ROI (what means Return On Investment, by the way =))
Of course your social media ROI has an impact of non-financial stuff like facebook-likes, retweets, etc. it is not your actual ROI.
Now I would like to describe three different methods of measuring your ROI of social media marketing

1. Your sales revenue: Is it increasing since you have set up your baseline? If yes that is good, of course, but it is pretty worthless if only three customers generated all your sales revenue and will not buy in the next months. That is why you also should have a look at....
2. the number of transactions: Since you have set up your baseline you should have more number of transactions, as you attract now the attention of more people by using Social Media and some of these people will probably buy some products from your company.
3. Another thing on what you should have a look at is your "mentions" in the social web. Whenever somebody talks about you, you should recognize that. But not only the positive mentions, also, and probably more important, the negative mentions. You can be satisfied if you have tons of positive mentions but you should keep an eye on the negative mentions to resolve the causes of these bad mentions in terms of not getting a bad word-of-mouth that is spread about you and you are not able to correct any more when it is too widely spoken.

Class 2 - case studies

In our last class we had to do some case studies. The group that I was in had the task to examine the Social Media Campaign of Patagonia.
The first question was to figure out what are the major Social Media mediums/tools  used by Patagonia.
At the moment they are using their own website(of course!), Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and their own blog called thecleanestline.com.
They have about 160.000 "likes" on their main facebook page, but "only" about 2.800 people are "talking about this". So it is good to have a high number of like because all the friends of somebody who "likes" Patagonia can also see this and with this the brand Patagonia is aware to a much higher number of people in facebook than their 160.000 likes. But as the number of talking about this is 2800, this number shows how many people are actually interacting with Patagonia and not only like them.

Next to this we were asked about their strongest and their weakest social media / online presence.
In our opinion Facebook is their weakest one at the moment because they get some posts on their facebook page but they do not respond to their potential customers via facebook. That could be a reason for that customers will not check ou the facebook page any more in the future - maybe they should hire somebody who is resposible for their facebook page and responds to posts on the Patagonia facebook page. As their strongest we chose their website because of a very unique and interactive tool called "Footprint chronicles". With this tool you can see the production from the raw material to the final distribution (because Patagonia wants to prove their very "green attitude and that it is not using any material that can be harmful for the environment).

In conclusion we can say Patagonia does a very good job regarding their online presence and can be seen as some kind of role model for other companies in terms of their Social Media campaign.

Class 1 - Homework

a) Discuss why is social media an important part of an organization’s marketing strategy?

 As I have already said in a former post (ucrxsocialmediawinter12), social media is not an importan part of an organization's marketing strategy, it is an essential part.
In these days where lots of people use social media (alone Facebook has about 800 million users!) there is no doubt that also companies have to be in the field of social media to perform a serious marketing job.
First of all social media is an easy way to reach a huge amount of your customers. For example, your customers only have to click the "like" button of your featured facebook page one time and from this point you can serve them with all the latest news about your newest products or whatever you want to communicate to your customers. Another aspect is that you can increase your brand awareness much easier as it was in times where there was no social media. To underline this, just think of the word-of-mouth factor which is becoming more and more important with the social media is growing: without social media you had to speak physically to your friends. Today you just tweet something and, depending on how many followers you have, you reach hundreds or even thousands of other people within seconds.

b) Why it is important to market yourself?

 I am not sure if it is neccessary or that important to market yourself by using social media. It can become very important when you apply for a job and your possible employee does a research on your social media presence. Because this is more and more common in the recruitment process, you definitely want to present in a professional way on your social media profiles.

c) How can you build your brand online?

It is not too difficult to build your brand online. I think one of the keywords for this is consistency. You should choose the same profile picture on each social media platform to create a certain value of brand recognition, your own brand. What comes along with this is the behavioral aspect in social media. For example when posting, tweeting, commenting,... something, you should keep in mind to do this also in a kind and professional way.

Social Media Marketing Strategy - class 1

a) I take this class because I think that companies will not be able to resign social media in their marketing campaigns in the future. But it is not only in the future, because I think the future of this whole social media marketing thing has already begun.You can see this on the fact that almost all huge companies have their own facebook and twitter account and use social media to connect with their customers.
b) I hope to get out some more insights on the whole social media, but especially how companies deal with this topic in their daily work.
c) I hope that I am able to give my company something to think about in the field of social media marketing and maybe we can adopt something in our marketing department.