I love the internet. I love social media. The way in which we can connect with so many like-minded people in the world is fantastic. The conversations, inspirations, challenging debates and the sheer vastness of creativity is truly awe-inspiring and I love it all. People empowerment, personal empowerment and the empowerment of our businesses means that we are in a fantastic position as individuals to earn a living from doing the things that we love most. Of course being the cool headed business minded people that we are, we have to understand what the return-on-investment is for anything that we can do.
Previously we had tried and tested, fully understood (supposedly) spreadsheets, graphs and charts which tell us what we get back from our spend on advertising and marketing. Now we have to measure things slightly differently. Friendships, fans and followers have a value which previously would bring scoffs and mocking retorts. Now they are our most valued allies in all that we do to promote our wares. Upset them and you can lose your investment in a flash. Nurture those relationships and you will have friends for life. More importantly if they like your products and what you do then you will have valuable advocates who will continue to sing your praises for a long time to come.
There is a fine balance to attain though. Playing and befriending can be fun but there comes a point at which it needs to be turned into hard cash. New skills are being developed to hone the ability of selling without selling, promoting without broadcasting and marketing your wares without actually having them obviously out on display. At times this can be tricky, especially if we don’t yet trust the process.
Having experimented with a whole host of approaches it is apparent that whatever you do it is all to do with ratios and numbers. There are often patterns and surprisingly it seems that for my particular business needs it follows a simple pattern of 10%.
1000 followers = 100 newsletter subscribers = 10 customers = 1 good customer
So if I want 100 customers who spend £x and 10 customers who spend 10x £x then I need to find 10,000 followers, fans and friends who share similar interests so that I can generate a bottom line income of £y. The question is how can we achieve that. Somehow we have to create and curate interesting content, get known for being a valuable source of information and remember that if we do a good job of it ANYTHING can go viral.
This video “Social Media ROI: Socialnomics” as some interesting statistics which you might find of interest. My question now though is what is your formula for working out your ROI on your social media and internet activities?