The Return on Investment of Professional Social Networks

Abstract

The rise of social media marketing leads to questions about its return on investment (ROI). In this paper we develop a new set of metrics to evaluate both financial and non-financial ROI of social media. While most studies on social media deal with Facebook and Twitter, this is one of the rare studies that address the ROI from the perspective of one-to-one message campaigns on professional social networks. Data were collected from a French business school campaign on LinkedIn aiming to recruit new students. We used this free available data to propose a new model for calculating the ROI. This model can be easily adopted by marketers to assess the social media ROI both in monetary and non-monetary terms.