I hear all the time that people are still skeptical about investing time and money in social media marketing campaigns. I mean, seriously? What more evidence do you need? Stop throwing out the “But, how do we measure ROI with social media?”. Just ask Vitamin Water, JetBlue, Dell, and Southwest how their investment in social media has worked out for them. Increased SALES is how you measure the ROI, and just ask the local restaurant or retail store that’s running an effective social media marketing campaign how it’s working out for them. It’ll still take a couple of years for the dissenters who hold onto old-fashioned marketing methods, so for those of you who still need to be convinced, here are 50 ways why social media marketing is here to stay: (in no particular order)

1. It’s two-way marketing
2. It’s a great customer service tool
3. It gives the customer a voice
4. It eliminates the need to spend a ton of money on focus groups.  Your following IS your focus group
5. Ask a marketing research question, and you get instant data.
6. The only cost to produce it is hiring great talent
7. Complaint resolutions are documented for other customers to see
8. The viral nature of it is closely related to the viral nature of word-of-mouth marketing
9. It IS word-of-mouth marketing, but in a digital sense.
10. You can make mistakes and explain why you made it
11. Intimate contact with your loyal customers and target market
12. You can focus on a very specific target market
13. It sends traffic back to your website
14. It builds inbound links to your website
15. It’s great for search engine optimization
16. Facebook pages can be used like a forum
17. Ability to create multiple Twitter profiles for multiple uses
18. Allows you to respond to what’s being said about your brand/business
19. It’s more natural than traditional marketing channels
20. You control the message
21. Endless creative promotion possibilities
22. Allows customers to participate in product development
23. It has the ability to reach a large amount of consumers on a perpetual time line.
24. It can reach a large amount of customers and fans in real-time.
25. Customers can respond and react to new business information and products in real-time.
26. It has the ability to increase sales
27. It has to ability to attract new clients
28. It can help you establish yourself as an expert or authority in your industry
29. Allows you to respond to complaints before negative word-of-mouth takes place.
30. Allows employees to be brand evangelizers.
31. The technology is free and open source
32. Social media is now adopted by most age groups.
33. Allows a competitive advantage over your competitors that aren’t using it
34. Allows a competitive advantage over your competitors that are abusing it or not using it correctly
35. Gives the ability to update customers about promotions and specials in real-time.
36. It has more than just a monetary return on investment.
37. We are social creatures.
38. It helps you build trust with the consumer
39. Experimenting won’t cost you a lot of money
40. It’s not as time consuming as you might think
41. Your customer’s opinion counts
42. Did we mention the technology is free?
43. It spans across all media, including photos, videos, audio, and text
44. It’s SO MUCH LESS annoying than text/SMS marketing
45. Its effectiveness BLOWS text/SMS marketing out of the water
46. Did I mention text/SMS marketing sucks?
47. You’re building an army of loyal customers we affectionately call “regulars”.
48. Builds team/employee morale
49. It can be used as a recruiting tool
50. Facebook has over 400 million active users worldwide.  Twitter has over 75 million users.  YouTube and Facebook are the #2 and #3 most visited websites in the world. Every second a new blog is created. Need I say more?

If you haven’t embraced social media for your business yet, then you’ve been living under a rock.  It’s here, and it’s here to stay.  It has a real return on investment, it WILL grow your sales if done right, and it DOES require someone who knows what they’re doing to run a successful campaign.  Are you convinced yet?  If so, check out my company’s website at Presence Media, and give us a call or contact us to discuss starting a social media marketing campaign for your small business.

I can’t remember who tipped me off to Hoot Suite when it first started up, but I am glad they did. It really has been a lifesaver web app for me. I manage about 20 different Twitter profiles right now, and there is no way that I’d be able to keep up with them if I didn’t have a good Twitter client to manage them. There are dozens of other Twitter clients out there that will manage multiple accounts at one time, but many of them are desktop applications that eat up a lot of memory and slow down my computer when I have 10 different web pages open, iTunes, FTP client, and instant messengers.

So, what’s so great about Hoot Suite?

• Allows you to add multiple social media accounts
• Supports Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Pages, Ping.fm and WordPress.com Blogs
• Twitter stats for all URL’s shortened using their ow.ly service
• Keyword tracking with separate columns
• Saved searches
• Twitter lists function (which can be used as a group type setting)
• Option to schedule tweets for a later date/time
• Browser bookmarklet allows you to tweet instantly, schedule a tweet and shorten links – all with the click of a button
• HootSuite provides desktop apps to compliment the web app too: Mac and PC programs, Chrome and Firefox extensions, even Greasemonkey scripts

Three Features That Make My Life Easier

The ability to schedule Tweets for later is so great. I am a purist when it comes to social media, so when I am at the computer, I use that time to interact with people, Re-tweet, and reply to people. But when you manage small business Twitter accounts, there are promotional tweets you need to get out there, so instead of spamming people with them all in one cluster, I schedule them for later and space out the tweets. Another great feature is the statistics that Hootsuite keeps for you. Any link you tweet using their personal link shortener, ow.ly, will track how many people click on that link. This is great, because small business owners usually want an idea of how many people are interacting with their Twitter content. You can also import RSS feeds to whatever Twitter account you want all within the Hootsuite interface.

HootSuite is Cloud Computing

There’s no importing or exporting required like when you have a desktop client. It saves all of your settings, because it’s a web application. I love this, some people reject it, but I want my entire digital life to be at my finger tips as long as I have internet access. This is why I am a huge fan of Google Apps for small business owners as well.

The HootSuite iPhone App

I recently downloaded this, it’s only $.99, but it still has some issues. I got rid of Tweetie 2, because it would only access like the last 30 minutes to an hour of tweets, and I like scrolling further back than that, and the HootSuite app has the same issue. It also didn’t show all of my accounts to be able to send one tweet to multiple accounts. So, it’s not perfect, but I am sure they will update soon. Here’s a short video about the app:

I was just reading this article by Jason Falls about the rise and fall of social media, and even though social media purists like me hate to read or hear it, he is right. The first thing that I learned when I started venturing out to find my own clients for social media marketing and consulting was that the bottom line is the bottom line. Ultimately, businesses will only invest time and money into a new marketing strategy if they think it’s going to bring people in the door or sell more product on their website. They don’t care about all of the intangibles that you think of as the ten commandments for social media. They ultimately just want results. And if they don’t get results, they don’t want you.

We live in a results driven society, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Could you imagine what this country would be like if we didn’t care about the end result? Our quality of life would be drastically less than it is now. Here are a few things that I’ve learned in my first year of bidding on social media marketing work.

Brand Awareness Is Not the Goal

Building brand awareness is important, and as a purist, I think that engaging with your customers on a personal level and getting viral exposure on Facebook and Twitter are great ways to build your brand awareness, but small businesses aren’t interested in social media marketing for brand awareness. It’s a nice side dish, but it’s not the main course. They want to know if it’s going to help them increase sales.

Small Businesses Want To Reduce Marketing Costs

They are interested in social media marketing because they think it will reduce marketing costs. I’ve had a harsh reality check with myself about what my service are worth, because ultimately the marketplace will dictate what I am worth to a company. Social media can and will reduce marketing costs if it’s done right. You still need to invest some money in the beginning to gain exposure and gain a large following. I always recommend Facebook ads to beef up fan count, because it’s relatively cheap and highly targeted if done right.

Brand Preservation is Important

I have found that many franchisees of large brands are interested in social media marketing and the franchisor gives them the flexibility to engage in this type of marketing, but they still need to preserve certain aspects of the brand. When helping a business with a mature brand, it’s important to respect the brand and make sure their social media presence complements their overall branding strategy.

Having said all of this, social media marketing won’t work unless you believe in the its core principles. It must be a conversation, it must be engaging, it must be interesting and interactive, and it must bring value to your customers, or they won’t care about it. It’ll be no different than a billboard to them. But that is why a small business owner hires someone like me. They know that I know how to do it right, they just don’t want to hear about all of the fairy tales and butterflies of social media. They want to know the bottom line, and social media can and does deliver the bottom line if you do it right.

The huge debate in the social media marketing niche industry right now is how to measure it. Traditional media experts who are learning about how to use social media to market their products and services want to know one thing: How do we measure the return on investment for social media marketing? Executives and small business owners are always thinking in terms of numbers and the bottom line, so they want to know what they are going to get back if they invest “X” amount of dollars into a social media marketing campaign. This brings about a great question, can social media be measured?

Liana Evans from Search Engine Watch wrote about whether or not social media can be measured. She outlines four “I’s” of measuring social media:

• Involvement: Just how involved is the community you’re engaging with? Are they visiting your site? Are they subscribing to your blog? How many video views do you have? Did they request information from your site or from a member of your team?
• Interactions: How are your efforts working in the way of gauging interactions? Are fan visits to your fan page increasing? Have those fans started conversations? How many replies to a post in a forum have you received? How many comments are your blog posts getting?
• Intimacy: Intimacy demonstrates the level of comfort/love/hate your audience feels with your company brands, products, or services. How much user generated content such as videos, photos, blog review sites or even threads in forums are being generated around your company? How many ratings are you receiving? What is the sentiment of your ratings or product/service comments?
• Influence: Just how much influence are your efforts (or those of other influencers) having on your strategy? How willing are people to recommend you? Did you get a brand awareness lift with your efforts? Are influencers sharing their opinions and are they creating user generated content around your products/services?

There are many factors that go into measuring your return on investment for a social media campaign. Feed subscribers, increase in web traffic, commenting, increased brand recognition, Facebook and Twitter influence, and even interactive customer service with customers are all great ways to measure social media.

Social media marketing is not just about numbers, it’s about building relationships and trust. This is tough to quantify, but the results will show up

The only problem is that many large companies still don’t accept these forms of measurement as real ways to measure ROI for a marketing campaign. They want to link your social media marketing efforts directly to an increase in sales and profit margin. Jason Falls from Social Media Explorer says that traditional media is still more accepted than social media. It’s because the return on investment doesn’t always show up on the income statement, initially. Increased brand recognition, real-time customer service, conversational marketing, and viral word-of-mouth marketing, does translate into higher profit margin, but it the results are often gradual and long-term.