What is the ROI from Twitter? An update.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted the following comment on over 20 LinkedIn travel marketing groups and tweeted it to my Twitter network to find out what others are doing to measure the fruits of their tweeting efforts:

“I'm looking for ROI stories for travel marketers using Twitter for an upcoming issue of The Wanderlust Report.”

While I received numerous stories of how people are using Twitter to market their destinations, I was surprised that just one of the 50 plus respondents could claim a measurable return on investment (two bookings with a staff investment of $50) - not much of an ROI.

The vast majority of respondents asked that I share any ROI stories with them. If you are one of those, I’m sorry to say that, so far, ROI stories are elusive.

I did receive two comments related to ROI that are worth sharing:

From anonymous, via our personal network:

"There is a company (can’t tell you who or I would have to kill you) that is developing a method to measure ROI from a variety of Social Networking tools including Twitter. While they are still in beta, they have discovered that the vast majority of conversions they are tracking from Twitter are current brand users. In this case, it appears that the Twitter platform is not a terribly effective tactic for attracting new customers, but is great at encouraging repeat business from existing customers - as long as you do not erode your revenue base via excessive discounting.

From Samantha Rufo, via LinkedIn groups:

Most companies are still developing their strategies. This is still very much early adopter marketing. The measure we use for Twitter is ROE (return on engagement) or how many people can we get to respond, refer, and/or react.

 The return will be very organization specific and may be more satisfaction successes than hard number successes. 

Some examples of social media return on engagement that we have used with clients include:



• Promotion. Able to offer season long and “last minute” special offers to guests to encourage sales during slower time periods.
• 
Reason to come. Able to drive people to their website using less paid advertising due to more interactive tools and content.

• Competition. Able to be more competitive by offering unique info or options with as little upfront cost to the resort as possible.

• Feeling from the marketing team of getting tremendous value from their efforts. Unlike traditional marketing where most marketers “feel” like it’s wasted. Efforts can be easily seen by the social media activity.
• 
Able to kick-off multiple “last minute” promotions in just a few days since a targeted network is already in place. This will not only enable marketers to spend less on direct mail and other forms of traditional marketing but also cut the lead time that would normally be needed using traditional marketing methods.

• Online analytics for campaign management also makes it simple for marketing staff to manage and track how many people are acting on information or clicking on links. NOTE- Return rates are directly affected by the quality of content, if incentives are used and the timeliness of what is being Tweeted.

From me:

I currently have 731 Twitter followers, more than 400 of them marketers in the travel & tourism industry. I didn’t receive a single response on my tweets of the query. In comparison, I received over 50 responses from fellow LinkedIn group members and the balance as a result of my question showing up in organic google search results.