How Much is Your Social Media Marketing Worth? – Click here http://bit.ly/hfyj2W for full article.

Written by : Nina Khoury

In retail, be it brick-and-mortar or e-commerce, you know exactly how to calculate your return on investment. For simplicity's sake, take the retail price and deduct all expenses: rent, taxes, payroll, office expenses, advertising, legal fees and everything else it takes to run your business. What’s left is your profit.

But how can you quantify and defend your social media marketing efforts and expenses? Is it all really worth it? After all, people cannot buy anything on Twitter or Facebook; there is no checkout button nor a place to enter credit card information.

In business, we all know that time is money. If you are spending your own time, or are paying someone else, to build your business’ Facebook community, to post tweets on Twitter and interact with your followers, are these faces and user names contributing anything to your bottom line or is it all just a giant waste of time? Are they actual leads and potential customers or just an accumulation of virtual identities with nothing better to do than click on every single "Follow Us" or "Like" button? How do you know?

There is no need to search for some scientific formula (but, of course, you’re free to try). Let me demonstrate a very simple way to apply metrics to your social media marketing efforts.

If we break down your virtual community’s activities on your social media playground and segment them by importance to your business, it all becomes easy and we can assign a monetary value to them:

Very Important ($10 per instance):
A direct message regarding a service or product, such as a Facebook message, Twitter direct message, etc.
A post or inquiry on your business Facebook or MySpace page about you or your business
A re-tweet including or praising you or your business

Important ($5):
- A Facebook "Like" or "Share"
- A simple re-tweet
- A reply to one of your Facebook or MySpace posts
- A comment to one of your blog posts

Potential ($1):
- A new follower on Twitter
- A new friend or fan on Facebook
- A new subscriber to your blog

If you keep track of all these instances, whether in an Excel spreadsheet or by using other tools, you very soon will be able to tell how much your social media marketing efforts are really worth.

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