If the social media has advertising attached to it, you measure ROI by the number of views / connections in the network versus the ad rate. You determine the revenue generated from the ad and compare it to the expense of placing the ad. Your ROI would also be impacted by the value of the network you are interested in. For example, if you are promoting meat and animal products, you probably would find a vegan social network a pretty low ROI target. On the other hand, if you were promoting ecologically friendly cleaning products there might be a peripheral interest for that vegan group that rated a higher network value.”
“Social media as a marketing tool on a small scale is going to be disappointing at best. The nature of “social” interactions via the web require a large number of people in order to be compelling. that is to say that if you have 100 people on your social media site connected with your light manufacturing firm, what is going to compel those people to return? Now if your talking about running adds on twitter, the story is different, however you need to consider your audience as well. are the masses using twitter going to be interested in what you have to offer enough to pay attention to your feed? Its best not to worry about the ROI directly, but rather look at social networking in the context of a broader “grass roots” campaign to build name recognition and brand identity. Leverage a blog and a social site with links to twitter, facebook or other well established sites. Give it away until it hurts, then see if they flock to your cause. Besides, doing small things and leveraging big things costs almost nothing, but might get huge returns. That’s the best I can offer on such a general basis.”
“go to www.Stevegasser.com. He has a bunch of stuff on social media marketing“