Social Media ROI: Part 1. Expand Your Sales Team With Social Media

Lately the social media conversation has been shifting from "what is social media?" to "can social media ROI be measured?" so I'm going to do a series of posts around measuring ROI with social media campaigns. I recently spoke at several Online Marketing Summit events and what I'm seeing is this: the people that get social media are at the events and they think it's a great addition to their marketing plans. What they need is help selling it to their higher ups. You know, the ones with the purse strings and checkbooks instead of Twitter feeds and Facebook pages.
Social Media Can Expand Your Sales Team. Without hiring one person, social media can help you get your message out. Take bloggers for instance. One blogger that writes about how great your product is has essentially given you access to their entire Rolodex (their network). If a blogger loves your restaurant, your security systems, or your travel site and writes a post about it, they have put your message into their words (product placement is going to be huge) and sent it to their readers who love and trust them. You haven't done anything wrong, just provided a great product that your fans want to write about.
You could have hired a salesperson to speak to 500 people they don't know about your travel site and had less success and paid a lot more to reach those 500 people. Maybe you would have had to place banner ads for a month to reach those 500 people, what would that have cost you?
I hesitate to call these brand advocates salespeople since they aren't employed by your company and aren't paid commission nor do they have to write about your product but they can very well bring in sales.
The same can be said about a well placed and relevant e-mail campaign that is forwarded to hundreds of friends or a community member that puts your "top 10 ways to...." article on their page.
Your job as a marketer is to supply all of these potential brand advocates with information that they can use. This is a win/win since the blogger or community member has engaging content to pass on and the brand wins because it has expanded it's sales reach without having to hire and train new salespeople.

~ Caitlin McCabe, Director of Social Media