Social Media can take some time to pay off in terms of ROI. After all it’s a medium whereby you need to build relationships first, before the opportunity presents itself to do business.

For companies this means an investment in resource and money, with the trust that they are also doing it right from the outset. I think there are enough case studies to show social media does have a payback, the most difficult thing is to apply those learnings to your company and industry.

There are ways you can accelerate this learning process, social media doesn’t have to be all passive. Building connections, engaging and being part of the community is important but you can be proactive whilst doing it.

So you may not have many Followers on Twitter, but if you ensure your Twitter profile is optimal and you understand the issues your potential clients have within your sector, you’re ready to get proactive in social.

Monitoring the social media space, especially Twitter, is one of my favourite tactics. Setting up simple searches around phrases related to your sector you can keep an eye out for people who need help. Build Twitter Lists of those prospects and you can speed the engagement process up many times over.

This simple process can help you build authority online in a very short time. You can get known locally or even internationally within your space with just a little planning and effort. Maximising the the opportunity of a positive ROI from your social media activity.

In the following video we walk you through the process of setting up a simple social media monitoring system using Hootsuite to help you implement this process efficiently into your business.

[Photo Credit: Michael Ransburg]