If you have a desire to optimize your brand on the World Wide Web, it is absolutely essential that you understand how to generate a good return on investment for your brand with social media marketing. Throughout the years, many marketing techniques have been utilized in order to determine their overall effectiveness in attracting consumers. Recently, social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter have quickly developed into the most widespread and popular forms of marketing for businesses that have a desire to optimize their online reputation.

While there are many different reasons why social media marketing is considered to be productive for businesses, one of the most popular reasons is that it has been found to generate free publicity by internet users regarding a company’s brand and reputation. When users actively participate on social media platforms, they share information with relatives, friends, coworkers, classmates and others that they are close to in their personal and professional lives. When trusted recommendations are made by these individuals, the brand of your business is dramatically optimized. Throughout this internet marketing guide, you will be presented with valuable information on how you, too, may generate a good ROI for your brand with social media.

ROI and Social Media

In order to appropriately generate a productive return on investment with social media platforms, you must first have a comprehensive understanding of social media marketing ROI. Essentially, return on investment is the revenue of your business, after expenses. In order to properly define ROI, you must determine what type of results will provide your business with value. After all, ROI is a measurement of the overall value that your business is experiencing. In order to experience a good return on investment on platforms such as Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, you must determine which types of activities and what types of users have the ability to produce interest in your business – that is, the products and/or services that your business focuses on delivering to consumers on a day to day basis.

Locate Your Consumers

Now that you understand that ROI is a measurement that evaluates value and that social media platforms have the ability to optimize your online reputation management in building brand, it is time to learn how to increase your ROI. The first step in this process is to locate your customers and/or potential customers on the platforms that you wish to utilize in your brand building endeavors. In order to find the consumers that will enhance the success of your business, you must determine where they are spending most of their time and what types of activities that they regularly engage in while participating in social media. According to statistics acquired in 2012, the following lists the social media platforms in which most people frequent, with “1” being the highest number of users and “5” being the lowest number of users:

  1. Facebook
  2. YouTube
  3. LinkedIn
  4. Twitter
  5. Google +

Now that you know where most of your customers and potential customers are lingering in the world of social media, you may now target your marketing campaigns to those specific platforms. However, being that social media marketing is often a time consuming task, you may simply choose one platform. Based on the 2012 statistics, the most productive platform to use is Facebook. Why? That is simple. It has the most users. This means that your business has the potential to reach a larger number of consumers in the shortest amount of time. Once you have located your customers and consumers that may be potential customers, it is time to move on to the next step in generating good ROI in social media marketing.