ROI of Social Media: How to Improve the Return on Your Social Marketing Investment

FOREWORD

Placing the user at the center of our thinking—whether in the way in which we design our software or the sales, marketing and services strategies we use—has always been of paramount importance at Microsoft. Indeed, empowering users with access to “information at their fingertips” was at the heart of the company's original philosophy when it was created 35 years ago.

Today, with over 90 percent of users choosing Windows for their computing needs, and the majority of these using their computer to connect to the Internet, social media is both a highly relevant and important marketing communication channel for us. What's more, we are also a significant digital media owner in our own right, providing our advertising clients with access to over 650 million Internet users a month through properties such as Windows Live, Hotmail, MSN, Bing and others.

So, at Microsoft, we are not just consumers of digital marketing and social media, but also major suppliers of solutions in this area as well. With this in mind, the ROI of social media is of great interest to us and we are an active and vocal contributor to this growing debate.

Recently though, it seems more and more business books are drawing conclusions that aren't completely fact-based. They analyze various successful companies and then find some nugget that seems to be the “one thing” that correlates with success and yet, after the book is published, those companies end up losing their ability to sustain success. More often ...