The United States Small Business Association defines a company with gross receipts of up to a maximum, on average, of $7MM dollars as a Small Medium Business (SMB). Therefore, when it comes to social media marketing, SMBs have small very small budgets and should be more sensitive to the impact of negative ROI on their social media marketing efforts. SMBs may view social media channels, such as Twitter, as a cheap or zero-cost way to extend their marketing and public relations functions. However, contrary to being cheap and effective, non-benchmarked and non-optimized, Twitter marketing, can be costly and can result in mostly negative ROI due to lack of sales or marketing contributions to the business.

Under-estimating the required time and resources for Twitter Marketing
MarketingProfs recently released a study that took a look at Social Media Marketing companies that have been using social media for more than three years and they found that these veterans are spending more on social media. Around 21.8% of social media marketing veterans say they devote at least two full-time staffers to social media, compared with 5% of rookies. However, most SMBs cannot afford to place full-time staff on their Social Media and Twitter marketing programs. These firms may have someone tweet a few times or for a few minutes, daily with the hope that someone will see a Tweet or that their brand awareness will grow. That’s a hope-and-pray strategy for most. Without any benchmark as to what is required to increase awareness or drive sales on Twitter, most SMB Twitter accounts, even with large followers fail to deliver positive ROI for their organizations.

Missing or very little Twitter Marketing strategy
Underestimating time and resources contributes to a lack of a clear and solid strategic plan for Twitter campaigns as part of a broader marketing engagement. Most Twitter marketing tools are free or a very low cost, relative to other marketing services and software. As such, it’s very tempting for any company, SMB or otherwise to get setup on Twitter and start tweeting. According to Social Media Guru Matt Singley, “the biggest temptation for any company with social media is that they want to jump right in without setting goals or having a strategy.” SMBs are sufficiently small that they may not have organizational resources to map out complex strategic approaches to their marketing programs. However, it’s still critical to have a Twitter marketing strategy that includes benchmarking, measurement and campaign optimization.

No Twitter Campaign Optimization
Even those SMBs that measure, many may not be optimizing their Twitter marketing campaigns, daily as sentiment, trends, and influence changes online. Firstly, SMBs may be local or regional businesses without large, global data-sets of data to process transactions and customer engagements. As such, these companies may see optimization as novel or out of reach of their organizational capabilities. Also, most free measurement tools provide measurement, but no benchmark in real-time. As a result, these companies fail to initially and continuously benchmark their performance against their target markets. Thus, they fail to optimize their Twitter marketing campaigns in real-time.

Failure to plan a strategy and to acquire a factual estimate of what it takes to be successful on Twitter means that most SMBs will try and dip their toes with a little Twitter marketing and expend ineffective resources to stay in the game. However, most will see only negative ROI from Twitter marketing continue to persist and may give up on Twitter as not effective.

Are you an SMB that wants Positive ROI from your social media and Twitter marketing objectives? Email us and ask about our risk-free trial of Twitter Optimizer for Small and Medium-sized Businesses.

Tags: Influence, marketing measurement, marketing roi, Social Media ROI, Social Media Strategy, Social Media Tools, tweets, twitter, Twitter ROI

This entry was posted on Monday, December 27th, 2010 at 7:58 AM by Taariq Lewis and is filed under Social Media ROI, Twitter ROI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.