The ROI of Social Media

In this week's class we talked about the Return on Investment of Social Media. The ROI, that's your ration of profit to costs. Because contrary to what everybody says, Social Media is not free! You invest time, you need the equipment and there are opportunity costs.


For companies, the ROI should of course be of a financial nature in the end. But I am not a company and I'm not selling things.  For me personally, ROI is more of an attention thing. The more attention and positive responses my blog gets, the more successful I am at marketing my blog (and thereby also marketing myself).

I can think of several ways to measure my ROI:
Take page views for example. It shows how many people invested their time into reading my posts, so it is a measurement of my success.
I could also measure my ROI by other people's involvement, meaning how many people commented on my posts or started to follow it.
As I am also on Twitter with my blog, measuring eyeballs (followers, retweets, mentions) is another way of analysing if my blog is successful.
And last but not least, this blog is still a class assignment, so getting an A on it would be the ultimate ROI right now ;)