What Is Your Social Media Worth?

(Photo credit: sitmonkeysupreme)

Have you ever considered putting a price tag on your social media accounts for you or your business? It can be a tough thing to do, especially as many small businesses rely far more on the power of social media to either deliver a message or drive traffic to other areas without actually investing any money in their strategy.

Facebook and Twitter offer a free service which when used well are actually powerful marketing tools. When you combine them with other digital options, such as well thought out SEO for you website, social media is actually worth its weight in gold.

It’s more than Likes and Posts

One of the biggest mistakes businesses make when utilising social media is to create and forget. That is, they create a presence then fail to maintain it. Having hundreds of likes on your Facebook page or hundreds of followers of your Twitter account doesn’t mean much if they don’t actually do anything to attract new business.

You need to make sure your social media strategy makes the most of the free service. Getting people to your page or following you digitally is just the first step. Actually offering something of interest or a service is the vital key. If you don’t give your visitors something then they won’t come back. That will then render your social media worthless.

Social media is low cost but it touches on everything from marketing to public relations, product development and sales. Its more than just saving money – it’s about making money the smart way. It also goes hand-in-hand with other digital technologies, such as VoIP, to show that you are moving with the modern times.

To put it simply…

Let’s take the case of a photographer. He was just starting out in the business but there was a lot of competition. He was good at his craft but he couldn’t attract the clients despite having a strong Internet presence that included a good Google ranking and an interactive website. So he took to Facebook, where he created a page for his business after considering a particular strategy.

At first the number of people visiting his page was a trickle. But he picked up a couple of clients and did a good enough job that they posted about his work on their pages. Pretty soon that trickle became a steady stream and he began picking up more clients. The snowball effect was in full swing and before he knew it he had more than 1000 “Likes” on his page, which was resulting in steady work. The price tag for his social media account is now directly related to the amount he has earned since he embarked on the campaign.

Looking to the future

Let’s keep up with our photographer. He has hit a wall – the number of new “Likes” has dropped off and he is picking up far fewer new clients. His initial strategy of simply creating a presence worked. But now he needs to take it to another level to drum up even more business. The tactic he takes, whether it be paid ads on Facebook, looking at Twitter, or looking for new markets, will reveal the true value of his social media. His future earnings can now be considered as the price tag of his social media.

The final word

The best way to determine what your social media is worth is by dividing the benefits by the costs. Just think of the photographer – the benefits were customers he never had before and the costs were just his time spent creating the page, updating it and interacting with his ‘fans’.

Many businesses now use professional marketers to help them get the most out of their social media, but even they have a hard time producing an actual monetary figure. In fact, statistics show that only 20% of marketers can actually calculate the return on investment of social media. But if you use it effectively and it results in sales – both directly and indirectly – then the value of your social media is actually limitless.