Measuring ROI For Social Media Initiatives

Source: Restaurant Startup & Growth  One of the most talked-about challenges for businesses when it comes to the social media arena, aside from putting aside the dollars, time and staff to engage in it, is figuring out a way to track or document any success with those initiatives.

Roughly 79 percent of 555 businesses from different verticals responding to a survey conducted by Mzinga, a social media software company, said they do not measure "return on investment" or ROI for the social media programs.

To begin with, 41 percent of respondents do not even know if their social tools can measure ROI. Neither Facebook nor LinkedIn not Twitter include stats on Web traffic hits, for example, associated with those platforms. And while all three platforms indicate how many "friends" or "followers" one has, it's difficult or impossible to compare the number of Facebook "fans" with increases or decreases in a restaurant's traffic, for example.

Oftentimes, fan page members may have different reasons for becoming fans, not just because they're regular customers. Or maybe the number of times they go to a restaurant still hasn't changed as a result of becoming a fan on their Facebook page.

What most businesses have done, then, is to look at the "bigger picture" when it comes to social media. For one, joining any of these three platforms is cheap. Building pages takes longer, however. But for some businesses, the costs of building and maintaining social media presence through staff labor and, in some cases, use of specific software or consulting input, still remains lower than investing in print and/or online advertising.

In addition, restaurants and other foodservice industry businesses have used social media not just as a means to drive customer traffic and build brand awareness, but also to enhance customer service by creating an interactive portal in which they can have a dialogue with their customers, addressing concerns and, in many cases, gaining or offering solutions for improving their offerings.

In a highly competitive market, being a "friend" of one restaurant over another may be just the thing to outshine a competitor and establish a long-term core of regulars. Find more information on social media at Mzinga.com.