The Benefits of Social Media Marketing for Dropship eCommerce: Fact or Fiction?

We are all hearing a lot about social media marketing these days. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and many others are definitely in the spotlight as ways to market your drop shipping ecommerce business.

But does social media marketing really work?

Can you truly increase your sales with Tweets and Twitter? Will you attract more traffic to your site if you diligently post on Facebook?

The answer is a definite YES.

If you are using social media to promote your online business, how can you determine the ROI, or Return on Investment?

Basically, getting the bottom line on your social media marketing ROI depends on what results you are hoping to achieve. For instance, are you looking to increase sales? Using social media marketing to build brand recognition? Trying to be more closely connected with your customers?

If your primary goal is to increase sales in your drop shipping ecommerce store, then you can very easily determine your ROI simply by adding up all the costs of paying others to maintain your social media marketing. If you aren’t paying anybody, and are the chief cook and bottle washer of your ecommerce business, then there is no cost and whatever increased sales you get as a result of social media marketing is 100% profit. So your ROI is 100%.

If you mainly want to build brand recognition for your drop ship business, there are a number of free tools that will help you calculate your ROI. Here are a few:

• Google Analytics: Collects and also displays website traffic data. You can monitor this info to see who is visiting your social media site.

• StatCounter: Once you add the code to your site, this is an invisible tracker that allows you to analyze and keep up with visitor activity as it is happening, in real time.

• Twitter Analyzer: Clear visual displays show you the topics, ideas and tweets that your visitors like the most.

If your primary objective is to improve customer relations and customer service, your ROI can be determined by what it costs to maintain the social media site---answer questions, etc. Again, if you are doing this job yourself, then there is no cost and any PR you get is invaluable.

Social media marketing is a great way to improve your dropshipping ecommerce business!