One Definition of Social Media ROI

Social Media ROI not always about the dollars

I’ve been thinking about social media ROI for a while.  I still haven’t figured it out.  If you asked, I couldn’t give you a great recommendation on the best metrics to use to prove ROI for your business.   Every brand wants to make a buck or two from their social media efforts, but I don’t think that is where the real value resides.

Our social media mission

When we entered into social media at Publix, our CEO wanted two things:

• any social media efforts we offered must be an extension of our retail store experience, where we strive to offer a premier shopping experience for each customer.
• we needed to differentiate the social media experience for our customers from those offered by our competition.

While we still have work to do, I think we have accomplished both those goals.    According to all the metrics we can find, we have a higher level of engagement with our Facebook fans than any of our retail competitors.   Our growth has been stellar, and our own fans have commented many times that they can’t believe how often and how quickly we respond to questions and customer concerns on Facebook.   I can’t share numbers, but our push marketing works too.

We accomplished this by one simple method. 

We talk to our customers.  The benefit of that is that our customers talk back to us.  We are engaging in conversation about our products, new store locations, how to save money shopping, and even suggestions on how to improve the shopping experience, coming from people who want to engage with our brand.  How awesome is that?

The ROI lies in the value added communication

We’re not able to measure customer conversions or how many sale are generated by a Facebook post.   We create our social ROI by offering the same kind of service to our customers on Facebook as they receive in our stores.

In our stores, we differentiate ourselves by offering service amenities to customers, such as assisting a customer in locating a product by walking them over to the proper area and pointing it out to them, and not just saying “over on aisle 7″.   We  offer carry-out service to each customer, offering to carry their groceries purchases to their car, even though many decline.   I can’t point to a metric that demonstrates the direct ROI of doing this, but we view them as value added services that are a part of a differentiated shopping experience.  Offering these services is a part of our cultural DNA.

Social media has not yet reached the level of being part of our cultural DNA yet.  Right now, it is a value added service that we offer to tech savvy customers that want engage with our brand.  It will be interesting to see how it looks in a couple of years.

Gary Vaynerchuk: What’s the ROI of your mom?

Here’s another perspective on ROI from a social media guy who is a little more well known than me:

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Tagged as: Business, Customer, Facebook, Gary Vaynerchuk, Internet marketing, Publix, Rate of return, Retail, Social Media, Social network, Value-added service