Paralegal Associates

I have been discussing social media a lot lately with the business manager for Paralegal Associates. I have had to do a lot of explaining as he come from an era of print ads, cold calls, and letters by hand.  I can always answer his questions, except for one.

What is the ROI?

I didn’t have a ready answer and based on the research I have done…no one else really has an answer either. Social media is about interaction.  How do you apply a number to a conversation?? You can’t easily do so. Eventually there will be a way to evaluate it. For now, I will just look at my own experience as a justification of my time spent on social media.

I started on Twitter early this year around end of January/beginning of February (you can find the business on Twitter here & me personally here). Around that time I also started my WordPress blog. This now the beginning of September, so we will say that I have been on for 7 months.  In that period of time I have made countless contacts, a few of which I can proudly call friends and I communicate with outside of the social media world. I have made professional contacts who had given me loads of advice regarding my career plans and my getting my business going. This is all well and good, but here is the main point:

In that time period, I have signed up 4 clients all off Twitter. That right there justifies my time. My business has a marketing budget of zero.  It is all on social media. The budget will increase as I go to self-hosting blogs and more sophisticated aspects of social media. But tell me, what start-up business can get clients with a marketing budget of zero? Only one that is using social media.

I will be addressing this topic more as I do more research into how to understand the ROI and as I have more experiences using social media. Keep checking back for updates. What are your thoughts on the ROI of social media?