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Is there a way to measure the ROI of social media?

I ask this question all the time and rarely get a concrete answer because it’s just one of those tactics that’s difficult to measure.

Research from MarketingSherpa’s new Social Media Marketing & PR Benchmark Guide suggests that 43% of marketers rank the inability to measure ROI the most significant barrier to social media adoption.

I still don’t have the answer, but here’s one example of a way social media can impact an Internet marketing campaign:

Steve Wiideman, an SEO expert and blogger at SEOExpert.tv, recently measured the impact of one Twitter post on a nonprofit organization’s website traffic.

What he discovered: If you can get a celebrity or someone with at least 30,000 followers on Twitter to mention and/or link to your site in a Twitter post, expect about a 1,000-visit boost in web traffic the day of the mention.

That’s what happened when actor Ashton Kutcher, who had more than 30,000 followers at the time, linked to AbolishSlavery.org. The nonprofit’s web traffic spiked to more than 1,500 visitors in one day.

To give some context, the nonprofit’s website got about 614 visits from organic search from Jan. 12 to Feb. 11.

Twitter has been the biggest driver of traffic in the last 30 days, Steve said.

That’s good news for AbolishSlavery.org, a nonprofit that depends on donations to help fulfill its mission to retrieve children from slavery and provide for their education, aftercare and vocational training.

See Steve’s blog post about The Power of Twitter or download his white paper.

About Natalie Myers

Natalie Myers writes for MarketingSherpa’s Great Minds and Content Biz newsletters. She covers a broad array of topics for Great Minds, regularly interviewing thought leaders and experienced marketers about innovative or highly successful marketing strategies. For Content Biz she focuses specifically on online subscriptions models, including anything you pay for to read, listen to, watch, rent (as in Software as a Service models), etc.

She writes blog posts about topics relating to her beats, including useful information from interviews that doesn’t make it into an article.

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Categories: Marketing, Non Profit Fundraising, Online Advertising, Search Marketing, Social Networking Evangelism Community Tags: nonprofit, ROI, social media, Twitter